Scientists are striving to discover new semiconductor materials that could boost the efficiency of solar cells and other electronics. But the pace of innovation is bottlenecked by the speed at which researchers can manually measure important material properties. A fully autonomous robotic system developed by MIT researchers could speed things up. Their system utilizes a…
In Bengaluru, India, Adithya Kolavi felt a mix of excitement and validation as he watched DeepSeek unleash its disruptive language model on the world earlier this year. The Chinese technology rivaled the best of the West in terms of benchmarks, but it had been built with far less capital in far less time. “I thought:…
Developers are doing incredible things with AI. Tools like Copilot, ChatGPT, and Claude have rapidly become indispensable for developers, offering unprecedented speed and efficiency in tasks like writing code, debugging tricky behavior, generating tests, and exploring unfamiliar libraries and frameworks. When it works, it’s effective, and it feels incredibly satisfying. But if you’ve spent any…
Google’s recent unveiling of what it calls a “new class of agentic experiences” feels like a turning point. At its I/O 2025 event in May, for example, the company showed off a digital assistant that didn’t just answer questions; it helped work on a bicycle repair by finding a matching user manual, locating a YouTube…
The explosive growth of AI-powered computing centers is creating an unprecedented surge in electricity demand that threatens to overwhelm power grids and derail climate goals. At the same time, artificial intelligence technologies could revolutionize energy systems, accelerating the transition to clean power. “We’re at a cusp of potentially gigantic change throughout the economy,” said William…
Last winter, during the construction of an affordable housing project on Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, a 32-year-old worker named Jose Luis Collaguazo Crespo slipped off a ladder on the second floor and plunged to his death in the basement. He was one of more than 1,000 construction workers who die on the job each year in the US, making…
The internet infrastructure company Cloudflare announced today that it will now default to blocking AI bots from visiting websites it hosts. Cloudflare will also give clients the ability to manually allow or ban these AI bots on a case-by-case basis, and it will introduce a so-called “pay-per-crawl” service that clients can use to receive compensation…
Peter sat alone in his bedroom as the first waves of euphoria coursed through his body like an electrical current. He was in darkness, save for the soft blue light of the screen glowing from his lap. Then he started to feel pangs of panic. He picked up his phone and typed a message to…
Last week, the technology companies Anthropic and Meta each won landmark victories in two separate court cases that examined whether or not the firms had violated copyright when they trained their large language models on copyrighted books without permission. The rulings are the first we’ve seen to come out of copyright cases of this kind….
Several researchers have taken a broad view of scientific progress over the last 50 years and come to the same troubling conclusion: Scientific productivity is declining. It’s taking more time, more funding, and larger teams to make discoveries that once came faster and cheaper. Although a variety of explanations have been offered for the slowdown,…