In a fascinating op-ed, David Bell, a professor of history at Princeton, argues that “AI is shedding enlightenment values.” As someone who has taught writing at a similarly prestigious university, and as someone who has written about technology for the past 35 or so years, I had a deep response. Bell’s is not the argument…
From addictive algorithms to exploitative apps, data mining to misinformation, the internet today can be a hazardous place. Books by three influential figures—the intellect behind “net neutrality,” a former Meta executive, and the web’s own inventor—propose radical approaches to fixing it. But are these luminaries the right people for the job? Though each shows conviction,…
Amid the turbulence of the wider global economy in recent years, the pharmaceuticals industry is weathering its own storms. The rising cost of raw materials and supply chain disruptions are squeezing margins as pharma companies face intense pressure—including from countries like the US—to control drug costs. At the same time, a wave of expiring patents threatens…
The agentic AI landscape is exploding. Every new framework, demo, and announcement promises to let your AI assistant book flights, query databases, and manage calendars. This rapid advancement of capabilities is thrilling for users, but for the architects and engineers building these systems, it poses a fundamental question: When should a new capability be a…
A common misconception about O’Reilly is that we cater only to the deeply technical learner. While we’re proud of our deep roots in the tech community, the breadth of our offerings, both in books and on our learning platform, has always aimed to reach a broader audience of tech-adjacent and tech-curious people who want to…
Innovator, futurist, and author Ray Kurzweil ’70 emphasized his optimism about artificial intelligence, and technological progress generally, in a lecture on Wednesday while accepting MIT’s Robert A. Muh Alumni Award from the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS). Kurzweil offered his signature high-profile forecasts about how AI and computing will entirely blend with human…
This article originally appeared on Medium. Tim O’Brien has given us permission to repost here on Radar. When you’re working with AI tools like Cursor or GitHub Copilot, the real power isn’t just having access to different models—it’s knowing when to use them. Some jobs are OK with Auto. Others need a stronger model. And…
The MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) recently celebrated the launch of the MIT–MBZUAI Collaborative Research Program, a new effort to strengthen the building blocks of artificial intelligence and accelerate its use in pressing scientific and societal challenges. Under the five-year agreement, faculty, students, and research…
Chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude have experienced a meteoric rise in usage over the past three years because they can help you with a wide range of tasks. Whether you’re writing Shakespearean sonnets, debugging code, or need an answer to an obscure trivia question, artificial intelligence systems seem to have you covered. The source of…