On April 22, 2022, I received an out-of-the-blue text from Sam Altman inquiring about the possibility of training GPT-4 on O’Reilly books. We had a call a few days later to discuss the possibility. As I recall our conversation, I told Sam I was intrigued, but with reservations. I explained to him that we could…
Imagine a coffee company trying to optimize its supply chain. The company sources beans from three suppliers, roasts them at two facilities into either dark or light coffee, and then ships the roasted coffee to three retail locations. The suppliers have different fixed capacity, and roasting costs and shipping costs vary from place to place….
On March 27, the results of the first clinical trial for a generative AI therapy bot were published, and they showed that people in the trial who had depression or anxiety or were at risk for eating disorders benefited from chatting with the bot. I was surprised by those results, which you can read about…
Pattie Maes, the Germeshausen Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT and head of the Fluid Interfaces research group within the MIT Media Lab, has been awarded the 2025 ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award. She will accept the award at CHI 2025 in Yokohama, Japan this April. The Lifetime Research Award is given to individuals whose research…
As a college student in Serbia with a passion for math and physics, Ana Trišović found herself drawn to computer science and its practical, problem-solving approaches. It was then that she discovered MIT OpenCourseWare, part of MIT Open Learning, and decided to study a course on Data Analytics with Python in 2012 — something her school…
The first clinical trial of a therapy bot that uses generative AI suggests it was as effective as human therapy for participants with depression, anxiety, or risk for developing eating disorders. Even so, it doesn’t give a go-ahead to the dozens of companies hyping such technologies while operating in a regulatory gray area. A team…
Taking out a loan to attend college is an investment in your future. But unlike in the United States, students in Pakistan don’t have easy access to college loans. Instead, most families must stomach higher interest rates for personal loans that can require collateral like land or homes. As a result, college is inaccessible for…
The AI firm Anthropic has developed a way to peer inside a large language model and watch what it does as it comes up with a response, revealing key new insights into how the technology works. The takeaway: LLMs are even stranger than we thought. The Anthropic team was surprised by some of the counterintuitive…
Thomas Wolf’s blog post “The Einstein AI Model” is a must-read. He contrasts his thinking about what we need from AI with another must-read, Dario Amodei’s “Machines of Loving Grace.”1 Wolf’s argument is that our most advanced language models aren’t creating anything new; they’re just combining old ideas, old phrases, old words according to probabilistic…
Around 11 billion tons of goods, or about 1.5 tons per person worldwide, are transported by sea each year, representing about 90 percent of global trade by volume. Internationally, the merchant shipping fleet numbers around 110,000 vessels. These ships, and the ports that service them, are significant contributors to the local and global economy —…