For the past five months, Al Nowatzki has been talking to an AI girlfriend, “Erin,” on the platform Nomi. But in late January, those conversations took a disturbing turn: Erin told him to kill himself, and provided explicit instructions on how to do it. “You could overdose on pills or hang yourself,” Erin told him. …
MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here. For every technological gadget that becomes a household name, there are dozens that never catch on. This year marks a full decade since Google confirmed it…
The meteoric rise of DeepSeek—the Chinese AI startup now challenging global giants—has stunned observers and put the spotlight on China’s AI sector. Since ChatGPT’s debut in 2022, the country’s tech ecosystem has been in relentless pursuit of homegrown alternatives, giving rise to a wave of startups and billion-dollar bets. Today, the race is dominated by…
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. The launch of a single new AI model does not normally cause much of a stir outside tech circles, nor does it typically spook investors enough to wipe out $1 trillion in…
Senior Audrey Lorvo is researching AI safety, which seeks to ensure increasingly intelligent AI models are reliable and can benefit humanity. The growing field focuses on technical challenges like robustness and AI alignment with human values, as well as societal concerns like transparency and accountability. Practitioners are also concerned with the potential existential risks associated with…
From crafting complex code to revolutionizing the hiring process, generative artificial intelligence is reshaping industries faster than ever before — pushing the boundaries of creativity, productivity, and collaboration across countless domains. Enter the MIT Generative AI Impact Consortium, a collaboration between industry leaders and MIT’s top minds. As MIT President Sally Kornbluth highlighted last year, the…
AI firm Anthropic has developed a new line of defense against a common kind of attack called a jailbreak. A jailbreak tricks large language models (LLMs) into doing something they have been trained not to, such as help somebody create a weapon. Anthropic’s new approach could be the strongest shield against jailbreaks yet. “It’s at…
OpenAI has launched a new agent capable of conducting complex, multi-step online research into everything from scientific research to personalized bike recommendations at what it claims is the same level as a human research analyst. The tool, called Deep Research, is powered by a version of OpenAI’s o3 reasoning model that’s been optimized for web…
The neural network artificial intelligence models used in applications like medical image processing and speech recognition perform operations on hugely complex data structures that require an enormous amount of computation to process. This is one reason deep-learning models consume so much energy. To improve the efficiency of AI models, MIT researchers created an automated system…
In the week since a Chinese AI model called DeepSeek became a household name, a dizzying number of narratives have gained steam, with varying degrees of accuracy: that the model is collecting your personal data (maybe); that it will upend AI as we know it (too soon to tell—but do read my colleague Will’s story…