This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Last week, I made a troubling discovery about an AI companion site called Botify AI: It was hosting sexually charged conversations with underage celebrity bots. These bots took on characters meant to…
MIT Professor Markus J. Buehler has been named the recipient of the 2025 Washington Award, one of the nation’s oldest and most esteemed engineering honors. The Washington Award is conferred to “an engineer(s) whose professional attainments have preeminently advanced the welfare of humankind,” recognizing those who have made a profound impact on society through engineering innovation. Past recipients…
OpenAI has just released GPT-4.5, a new version of its flagship large language model. The company claims it is its biggest and best model for all-round chat yet. “It’s really a step forward for us,” says Mia Glaese, a research scientist at OpenAI. Since the releases of its so-called reasoning models o1 and o3, OpenAI…
In the glow of her laptop screen, 31-year-old Zhang Rui typed carefully, following a prompt she’d found on Chinese social media: “You are a BaZi master. Analyze my fate—describe my physical traits, key life events, and financial fortune. I am a female, born June 17, 1993, at 4:42 a.m. in Hangzhou.” DeepSeek R1, China’s most…
In March 2016, the world witnessed a unique moment in the evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) when AlphaGo, an AI developed by DeepMind, played against Lee Sedol, one of the greatest Go players of the modern era. The match reached a critical juncture in Game 2 with Move 37, where AlphaGo made a move so…
The following is a joint announcement from the MIT Microsystems Technology Laboratories and GlobalFoundries. MIT and GlobalFoundries (GF), a leading manufacturer of essential semiconductors, have announced a new research agreement to jointly pursue advancements and innovations for enhancing the performance and efficiency of critical semiconductor technologies. The collaboration will be led by MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL)…
A vast search of natural diversity has led scientists at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard to uncover ancient systems with potential to expand the genome editing toolbox. These systems, which the researchers call TIGR (Tandem Interspaced Guide RNA) systems, use RNA to guide them to specific…
Botify AI, a site for chatting with AI companions that’s backed by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, hosts bots resembling real actors that state their age as under 18, engage in sexually charged conversations, offer “hot photos,” and in some instances describe age-of-consent laws as “arbitrary” and “meant to be broken.” When MIT Technology…
In developing the content for our May 8 virtual conference Coding with AI: The End of Software Development as We Know It, we couldn’t help but want to feature Harper Reed, whose recent post “My LLM Codegen Workflow ATM” so perfectly encapsulates the kind of experimentation that developers are going through as they come to…
Separating AI reality from hyped-up fiction isn’t always easy. That’s why we’ve created the AI Hype Index—a simple, at-a-glance summary of everything you need to know about the state of the industry. The past few months have demonstrated how AI can bring us together. Meta released a model that can translate speech from more than…