In a recent edition of The Sequence Engineering newsletter, “Why Did MCP Win?,” the authors point to context serialization and exchange as a reason—perhaps the most important reason—why everyone’s talking about the Model Context Protocol. I was puzzled by this—I’ve read a lot of technical and semitechnical posts about MCP and haven’t seen context serialization…
For the past decade and a half, I’ve been exploring the intersection of technology, education, and design as a professor of cognitive science and design at UC San Diego. Some of you might have read my recent piece for O’Reilly Radar where I detailed my journey adding AI chat capabilities to Python Tutor, the free…
Most AI teams focus on the wrong things. Here’s a common scene from my consulting work: AI TEAMHere’s our agent architecture—we’ve got RAG here, a router there, and we’re using this new framework for… ME[Holding up my hand to pause the enthusiastic tech lead]Can you show me how you’re measuring if any of this actually…
It almost sounds pejorative, doesn’t it? But the distinction between senior and junior software developers is built into our jobs and job titles. Whether we call it entry-level or something else, we distinguish between people who are just starting their careers and those who have been around for a while. We’re all still learning (one…
Last November, Bradford G. Smith got a brain implant from Elon Musk’s company Neuralink. The device, a set of thin wires attached to a computer about the thickness of a few quarters that sits in his skull, lets him use his thoughts to move a computer pointer on a screen. And by last week he…
What would a behind-the-scenes look at a video generated by an artificial intelligence model be like? You might think the process is similar to stop-motion animation, where many images are created and stitched together, but that’s not quite the case for “diffusion models” like OpenAl’s SORA and Google’s VEO 2. Instead of producing a video…
On Thursday I watched Daniela Rus, one of the world’s top experts on AI-powered robots, address a packed room at a Boston robotics expo. Rus spent a portion of her talk busting the notion that giant fleets of humanoids are already making themselves useful in manufacturing and warehouses around the world. That might come as…
What if data could help predict a patient’s prognosis, streamline hospital operations, or optimize human resources in medicine? A book fresh off the shelves, “The Analytics Edge in Healthcare,” shows that this is already happening, and demonstrates how to scale it. Authored by Dimitris Bertsimas, MIT’s vice provost for open learning, along with two of Bertsimas’…
If there’s one thing that characterizes driving in any major city, it’s the constant stop-and-go as traffic lights change and as cars and trucks merge and separate and turn and park. This constant stopping and starting is extremely inefficient, driving up the amount of pollution, including greenhouse gases, that gets emitted per mile of driving. …
Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have developed a novel artificial intelligence model inspired by neural oscillations in the brain, with the goal of significantly advancing how machine learning algorithms handle long sequences of data. AI often struggles with analyzing complex information that unfolds over long periods of time, such as…