Google DeepMind’s latest update to a top Gemini AI model includes a dial to control how much the system “thinks” through a response. The new feature is ostensibly designed to save money for developers, but it also concedes a problem: Reasoning models, the tech world’s new obsession, are prone to overthinking, burning money and energy in the process. Since 2019, there have been a couple of tried and true ways to make an AI model more powerful. One was to make it bigger by using more training data, and the other was to give it better feedback on what constitutes […]

Anyone who crammed for exams in college knows that an impressive ability to regurgitate information is not synonymous with critical thinking. The large language models (LLMs) first publicly released in 2022 were impressive but limited—like talented students who excel at multiple-choice exams but stumble when asked to defend their logic. Today’s advanced reasoning models are more akin to seasoned graduate students who can navigate ambiguity and backtrack when necessary, carefully working through problems with a methodical approach. As AI systems that learn by mimicking the mechanisms of the human brain continue to advance, we’re witnessing an evolution in models from […]

MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here. When OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy excitedly took to X back in February to post about his new hobby, he probably had no idea he was about to coin a phrase that encapsulated an entire movement steadily gaining momentum across the world. “There’s a new kind of coding I call ‘vibe coding’, where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists,” he said. “I’m […]