Imagine a boombox that tracks your every move and suggests music to match your personal dance style. That’s the idea behind “Be the Beat,” one of several projects from MIT course 4.043/4.044 (Interaction Intelligence), taught by Marcelo Coelho in the Department of Architecture, that were presented at the 38th annual NeurIPS (Neural Information Processing Systems)…
A home robot trained to perform household tasks in a factory may fail to effectively scrub the sink or take out the trash when deployed in a user’s kitchen, since this new environment differs from its training space. To avoid this, engineers often try to match the simulated training environment as closely as possible with…
January has been notable for the number of important announcements in AI. For me, two stand out: the US government’s support for the Stargate Project, a giant data center costing $500 billion, with investments coming from Oracle, Softbank, and OpenAI; and DeepSeek’s release of its R1 reasoning model, trained at an estimated cost of roughly…
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Just a week in, the AI sector has already seen its first battle of wits under the new Trump administration. The clash stems from two key pieces of news: the announcement of…
Robots have come a long way since the Roomba. Today, drones are starting to deliver door to door, self-driving cars are navigating some roads, robo-dogs are aiding first responders, and still more bots are doing backflips and helping out on the factory floor. Still, Luca Carlone thinks the best is yet to come. Carlone, who…
The AI community is abuzz over DeepSeek R1, a new open-source reasoning model. The model was developed by the Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, which claims that R1 matches or even surpasses OpenAI’s ChatGPT o1 on multiple key benchmarks but operates at a fraction of the cost. “This could be a truly equalizing breakthrough that is…
Businesses and developers often face a steep learning curve when installing clean energy technologies, such as solar installations and EV chargers. To get a fair deal, they need to navigate a complex bidding process that involves requesting proposals, evaluating bids, and ultimately contracting with a provider. Now the startup Station A, founded by a pair…
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. Jan Liphardt teaches bioengineering at Stanford, but to many strangers in Los Altos, California, he is a peculiar man they see walking a four-legged robotic dog down…
After weeks of buzz, OpenAI has released Operator, its first AI agent. Operator is a web app that can carry out simple online tasks in a browser, such as booking concert tickets or filling an online grocery order. The app is powered by a new model called Computer-Using Agent—CUA (“coo-ah”), for short—built on top of…
As the capabilities of generative AI models have grown, you’ve probably seen how they can transform simple text prompts into hyperrealistic images and even extended video clips. More recently, generative AI has shown potential in helping chemists and biologists explore static molecules, like proteins and DNA. Models like AlphaFold can predict molecular structures to accelerate…