Latest from MIT Tech Review – OpenAI ups its lobbying efforts nearly seven-fold

OpenAI spent $1.76 million on lobbying in 2024 and $510,000 in the last three months of the year alone, according to a new disclosure filed on Tuesday—a significant jump from 2023 when the company disclosed just $260,000 spent on Capitol Hill. The company also disclosed a new in-house lobbyist, Meghan Dorn, who worked for five…

Latest from MIT : The multifaceted challenge of powering AI

Artificial intelligence has become vital in business and financial dealings, medical care, technology development, research, and much more. Without realizing it, consumers rely on AI when they stream a video, do online banking, or perform an online search. Behind these capabilities are more than 10,000 data centers globally, each one a huge warehouse containing thousands…

O’Reilly Media – Beyond “Prompt and Pray”

TL;DR: Enterprise AI teams are discovering that purely agentic approaches (dynamically chaining LLM calls) don’t deliver the reliability needed for production systems.The prompt-and-pray model—where business logic lives entirely in prompts—creates systems that are unreliable, inefficient, and impossible to maintain at scale.A shift toward structured automation, which separates conversational ability from business logic execution, is needed…

Latest from MIT Tech Review – Why it’s so hard to use AI to diagnose cancer

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Peering into the body to find and diagnose cancer is all about spotting patterns. Radiologists use x-rays and magnetic resonance imaging to illuminate tumors, and pathologists examine tissue from kidneys, livers,…

Latest from MIT Tech Review – The second wave of AI coding is here

Ask people building generative AI what generative AI is good for right now—what they’re really fired up about—and many will tell you: coding.  “That’s something that’s been very exciting for developers,” Jared Kaplan, chief scientist at Anthropic, told MIT Technology Review this month: “It’s really understanding what’s wrong with code, debugging it.” Copilot, a tool…

Latest from MIT : Explained: Generative AI’s environmental impact

In a two-part series, MIT News explores the environmental implications of generative AI. In this article, we look at why this technology is so resource-intensive. A second piece will investigate what experts are doing to reduce genAI’s carbon footprint and other impacts. The excitement surrounding potential benefits of generative AI, from improving worker productivity to advancing scientific…

Latest from MIT : Algorithms and AI for a better world

Amid the benefits that algorithmic decision-making and artificial intelligence offer — including revolutionizing speed, efficiency, and predictive ability in a vast range of fields — Manish Raghavan is working to mitigate associated risks, while also seeking opportunities to apply the technologies to help with preexisting social concerns. “I ultimately want my research to push towards…

Latest from MIT : Making the art world more accessible

In the world of high-priced art, galleries usually act as gatekeepers. Their selective curation process is a key reason galleries in major cities often feature work from the same batch of artists. The system limits opportunities for emerging artists and leaves great art undiscovered. NALA was founded by Benjamin Gulak ’22 to disrupt the gallery…

Latest from MIT Tech Review – Meta’s new AI model can translate speech from more than 100 languages

Meta has released a new AI model that can translate speech from 101 different languages. It represents a step toward real-time, simultaneous interpretation, where words are translated as soon as they come out of someone’s mouth.  Typically, translation models for speech use a multistep approach. First they translate speech into text. Then they translate that…

Latest from MIT : New computational chemistry techniques accelerate the prediction of molecules and materials

Back in the old days — the really old days — the task of designing materials was laborious. Investigators, over the course of 1,000-plus years, tried to make gold by combining things like lead, mercury, and sulfur, mixed in what they hoped would be just the right proportions. Even famous scientists like Tycho Brahe, Robert…