Any motorist who has ever waited through multiple cycles for a traffic light to turn green knows how annoying signalized intersections can be. But sitting at intersections isn’t just a drag on drivers’ patience — unproductive vehicle idling could contribute as much as 15 percent of the carbon dioxide emissions from U.S. land transportation. A…
Four new faculty members join the School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P) this fall, offering the MIT community creativity, knowledge, and scholarship in multidisciplinary roles. “These individuals add considerable strength and depth to our faculty,” says Hashim Sarkis, dean of the School of Architecture and Planning. “We are excited for the academic vigor they bring…
Last week, Mark Zuckerberg declared that Meta is aiming to achieve smarter-than-human AI. He seems to have a recipe for achieving that goal, and the first ingredient is human talent: Zuckerberg has reportedly tried to lure top researchers to Meta Superintelligence Labs with nine-figure offers. The second ingredient is AI itself. Zuckerberg recently said on…
Artificial intelligence is changing the way businesses store and access their data. That’s because traditional data storage systems were designed to handle simple commands from a handful of users at once, whereas today, AI systems with millions of agents need to continuously access and process large amounts of data in parallel. Traditional data storage systems…
OpenAI has finally released its first open-weight large language models since 2019’s GPT-2. These new “gpt-oss” models are available in two different sizes and score similarly to the company’s o3-mini and o4-mini models on several benchmarks. Unlike the models available through OpenAI’s web interface, these new open models can be freely downloaded, run, and even…
OpenAI has given itself a dual mandate. On the one hand, it’s a tech giant rooted in products, including of course ChatGPT, which people around the world reportedly send 2.5 billion requests to each day. But its original mission is to serve as a research lab that will not only create “artificial general intelligence” but…
M.C. Escher’s artwork is a gateway into a world of depth-defying optical illusions, featuring “impossible objects” that break the laws of physics with convoluted geometries. What you perceive his illustrations to be depends on your point of view — for example, a person seemingly walking upstairs may be heading down the steps if you tilt…
A growing number of companies are launching AI agents that can do things on your behalf—actions like sending an email, making a document, or editing a database. Initial reviews for these agents have been mixed at best, though, because they struggle to interact with all the different components of our digital lives. Part of the…
A new study from Anthropic suggests that traits such as sycophancy or evilness are associated with specific patterns of activity in large language models—and turning on those patterns during training can, paradoxically, prevent the model from adopting the related traits. Large language models have recently acquired a reputation for behaving badly. In April, ChatGPT suddenly…
For the past couple of years, OpenAI has felt like a one-man brand. With his showbiz style and fundraising glitz, CEO Sam Altman overshadows all other big names on the firm’s roster. Even his bungled ouster ended with him back on top—and more famous than ever. But look past the charismatic frontman and you get…