Artificial Intelligence

The deep neural network models that power today’s most demanding machine-learning applications have grown so large and complex that they are pushing the limits of traditional electronic computing hardware. Photonic hardware, which can perform machine-learning computations with light, offers a faster and more energy-efficient alternative. However, there are some types of neural network computations that…

Generative AI has taken off. Since the introduction of ChatGPT in November 2022, businesses have flocked to large language models (LLMs) and generative AI models looking for solutions to their most complex and labor-intensive problems. The promise that customer service could be turned over to highly trained chat platforms that could recognize a customer’s problem and…

A Japanese publishing startup is using Anthropic’s flagship large language model Claude to help translate manga into English, allowing the company to churn out a new title for a Western audience in just a few days rather than the 2-3 months it would take a team of humans. Orange was founded by Shoko Ugaki, a…

President Biden’s administration will end within two months, and likely to depart with him is Arati Prabhakar, the top mind for science and technology in his cabinet. She has served as Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy since 2022 and was the first to demonstrate ChatGPT to the president in…

It is fairly common in public discourse for someone to announce, “I brought data to this discussion,” thus casting their own conclusions as empirical and rational. It is less common to ask: Where did the data come from? How was it collected? Why is there data about some things but not others? MIT Associate Professor…

Left to their own devices, an army of AI characters didn’t just survive — they thrived. They developed in-game jobs, shared memes, voted on tax reforms and even spread a religion. The experiment played out on the open-world gaming platform Minecraft, where up to 1000 software agents at a time used large language models (LLMs)…

There is a crisis in technical education. The golden road to a career has always been through a college education. However, this “golden road” has developed deep cracks and is badly in need of maintenance. Postsecondary education is rapidly becoming unaffordable, even at public colleges and universities. Tuition has risen at a rate 50% greater…

Generative AI models have become remarkably good at conversing with us, and creating images, videos, and music for us, but they’re not all that good at doing things for us.  AI agents promise to change that. Think of them as AI models with a script and a purpose. They tend to come in one of…

Every time a new AI model is released, it’s typically touted as acing its performance against a series of benchmarks. OpenAI’s GPT-4o, for example, was launched in May with a compilation of results that showed its performance topping every other AI company’s latest model in several tests. The problem is that these benchmarks are poorly…

Captivated as a child by video games and puzzles, Marzyeh Ghassemi was also fascinated at an early age in health. Luckily, she found a path where she could combine the two interests.  “Although I had considered a career in health care, the pull of computer science and engineering was stronger,” says Ghassemi, an associate professor in…