In a wide-ranging Roundtables conversation for MIT Technology Review subscribers, AI journalist and author Karen Hao spoke about her new book, Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI. She talked with executive editor Niall Firth about how she first covered the company in 2020 while on staff at MIT Technology Review, and…
Anthropic released news that its models have attempted to contact the police or take other action when they are asked to do something that might be illegal. The company’s also conducted some experiments in which Claude threatened to blackmail a user who was planning to turn it off. As far as I can tell, this…
From a cluster of call centers in Canada, a criminal network defrauded elderly victims in the US out of $21 million in total between 2021 and 2024. The fraudsters used voice over internet protocol technology to dupe victims into believing the calls came from their grandchildren in the US, customizing conversations using banks of personal data,…
Today’s AI landscape is defined by the ways in which neural networks are unlike human brains. A toddler learns how to communicate effectively with only a thousand calories a day and regular conversation; meanwhile, tech companies are reopening nuclear power plants, polluting marginalized communities, and pirating terabytes of books in order to train and run…
For all their impressive capabilities, large language models (LLMs) often fall short when given challenging new tasks that require complex reasoning skills. While an accounting firm’s LLM might excel at summarizing financial reports, that same model could fail unexpectedly if tasked with predicting market trends or identifying fraudulent transactions. To make LLMs more adaptable, MIT…
Data and politics are becoming increasingly intertwined. Today’s political campaigns and voter mobilization efforts are now entirely data-driven. Voters, pollsters, and elected officials are relying on data to make choices that have local, regional, and national impacts. A Department of Political Science course offers students tools to help make sense of these choices and their…
The MIT Health and Life Sciences Collaborative (MIT HEALS) is launching the Biswas Postdoctoral Fellowship Program to advance the work of outstanding early-career researchers in health and life sciences. Supported by a gift from the Biswas Family Foundation, the program aims to help apply cutting-edge research to improve health care and the lives of millions….
Scientists are striving to discover new semiconductor materials that could boost the efficiency of solar cells and other electronics. But the pace of innovation is bottlenecked by the speed at which researchers can manually measure important material properties. A fully autonomous robotic system developed by MIT researchers could speed things up. Their system utilizes a…
In Bengaluru, India, Adithya Kolavi felt a mix of excitement and validation as he watched DeepSeek unleash its disruptive language model on the world earlier this year. The Chinese technology rivaled the best of the West in terms of benchmarks, but it had been built with far less capital in far less time. “I thought:…
Developers are doing incredible things with AI. Tools like Copilot, ChatGPT, and Claude have rapidly become indispensable for developers, offering unprecedented speed and efficiency in tasks like writing code, debugging tricky behavior, generating tests, and exploring unfamiliar libraries and frameworks. When it works, it’s effective, and it feels incredibly satisfying. But if you’ve spent any…