In 2000, Patrick J. McGovern ’59 and Lore Harp McGovern made an extraordinary gift to establish the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, driven by their deep curiosity about the human mind and their belief in the power of science to change lives. Their $350 million pledge began with a simple yet audacious vision: to understand the human brain in all its complexity, and to leverage that understanding for the betterment of humanity. Twenty-five years later, the McGovern Institute stands as a testament to the power of interdisciplinary collaboration, continuing to shape our understanding of the brain and improve the […]

Programmers can now use large language models (LLMs) to generate computer code more quickly. However, this only makes programmers’ lives easier if that code follows the rules of the programming language and doesn’t cause a computer to crash. Some methods exist for ensuring LLMs conform to the rules of whatever language they are generating text in, but many of these methods either distort the model’s intended meaning or are too time-consuming to be feasible for complex tasks. A new approach developed by researchers at MIT and elsewhere automatically guides an LLM to generate text that adheres to the rules of […]

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 […]