Reports from the US Government Accountability Office on improper federal payments in recent years are circulating on X and elsewhere online, and they seem to be a big influence on Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency and its supporters as the group pursues cost-cutting measures across the federal government. The payment reports have been…
A lot has changed in the 15 years since Kaiming He was a PhD student. “When you are in your PhD stage, there is a high wall between different disciplines and subjects, and there was even a high wall within computer science,” He says. “The guy sitting next to me could be doing things that…
Should you grab your umbrella before you walk out the door? Checking the weather forecast beforehand will only be helpful if that forecast is accurate. Spatial prediction problems, like weather forecasting or air pollution estimation, involve predicting the value of a variable in a new location based on known values at other locations. Scientists typically…
Sara Beery came to MIT as an assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) eager to focus on ecological challenges. She has fashioned her research career around the opportunity to apply her expertise in computer vision, machine learning, and data science to tackle real-world issues in conservation and sustainability. Beery…
There’s a lot of chatter in the media that software developers will soon lose their jobs to AI. I don’t buy it. It is not the end of programming. It is the end of programming as we know it today. That is not new. The first programmers connected physical circuits to perform each calculation. They…
Enterprise adoption of generative AI technologies has undergone explosive growth in the last two years and counting. Powerful solutions underpinned by this new generation of large language models (LLMs) have been used to accelerate research, automate content creation, and replace clunky chatbots with AI assistants and more sophisticated AI agents that closely mimic human interaction….
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…