January has been notable for the number of important announcements in AI. For me, two stand out: the US government’s support for the Stargate Project, a giant data center costing $500 billion, with investments coming from Oracle, Softbank, and OpenAI; and DeepSeek’s release of its R1 reasoning model, trained at an estimated cost of roughly $5 million—a large number but roughly one-tenth what it cost OpenAI to train its o1 models. US culture has long assumed that bigger is better, and that more expensive is better. That’s certainly part of what’s behind the most expensive data center ever conceived. But […]

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Just a week in, the AI sector has already seen its first battle of wits under the new Trump administration. The clash stems from two key pieces of news: the announcement of the Stargate project, which would spend $500 billion—more than the Apollo space program—on new AI data centers, and the release of a powerful new model from China. Together, they raise important questions the industry needs to answer about the extent to which the race for […]

Robots have come a long way since the Roomba. Today, drones are starting to deliver door to door, self-driving cars are navigating some roads, robo-dogs are aiding first responders, and still more bots are doing backflips and helping out on the factory floor. Still, Luca Carlone thinks the best is yet to come. Carlone, who recently received tenure as an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro), directs the SPARK Lab, where he and his students are bridging a key gap between humans and robots: perception. The group does theoretical and experimental research, all toward expanding a […]