This is the first of a three-part series by Markus Eisele. Stay tuned for the follow-up posts. AI is everywhere right now. Every conference, keynote, and internal meeting has someone showing a prototype powered by a large language model. It looks impressive. You ask a question, and the system answers in natural language. But if…
On Thursday, I published a story about the police-tech giant Flock Safety selling its drones to the private sector to track shoplifters. Keith Kauffman, a former police chief who now leads Flock’s drone efforts, described the ideal scenario: A security team at a Home Depot, say, launches a drone from the roof that follows shoplifting…
In part 2 of our two-part series on generative artificial intelligence’s environmental impacts, MIT News explores some of the ways experts are working to reduce the technology’s carbon footprint. The energy demands of generative AI are expected to continue increasing dramatically over the next decade. For instance, an April 2025 report from the International Energy Agency predicts…
When I was eight years old, I watched a mountaineering documentary while waiting for the cricket match to start. I remember being incredibly frustrated watching these climbers inch their way up a massive rock face, stopping every few feet to hammer what looked like giant nails into the mountain. “Why don’t they just climb faster?”…
Generative AI has enabled the production of child sexual abuse images to skyrocket. Now the leading investigator of child exploitation in the US is experimenting with using AI to distinguish AI-generated images from material depicting real victims, according to a new government filing. The Department of Homeland Security’s Cyber Crimes Center, which investigates child exploitation…
Flock Safety, whose drones were once reserved for police departments, is now offering them for private-sector security, the company announced today, with potential customers including including businesses intent on curbing shoplifting. Companies in the US can now place Flock’s drone docking stations on their premises. If the company has a waiver from the Federal Aviation…
Machine-learning models can speed up the discovery of new materials by making predictions and suggesting experiments. But most models today only consider a few specific types of data or variables. Compare that with human scientists, who work in a collaborative environment and consider experimental results, the broader scientific literature, imaging and structural analysis, personal experience…
The productivity gains from AI tools are undeniable. Development teams are shipping faster, marketing campaigns are launching quicker, and deliverables are more polished than ever. But if you’re a technology leader watching these efficiency improvements, you might want to ask yourself a harder question: Are we building a more capable organization, or are we unintentionally…
When Kenneth Wehr started managing the Greenlandic-language version of Wikipedia four years ago, his first act was to delete almost everything. It had to go, he thought, if it had any chance of surviving. Wehr, who’s 26, isn’t from Greenland—he grew up in Germany—but he had become obsessed with the island, an autonomous Danish territory,…
Annotating regions of interest in medical images, a process known as segmentation, is often one of the first steps clinical researchers take when running a new study involving biomedical images. For instance, to determine how the size of the brain’s hippocampus changes as patients age, the scientist first outlines each hippocampus in a series of…