In 2019, Karen Hao, a senior reporter with MIT Technology Review, pitched me on writing a story about a then little-known company, OpenAI. It was her biggest assignment to date. Hao’s feat of reporting took a series of twists and turns over the coming months, eventually revealing how OpenAI’s ambition had taken it far afield…
After a post by Andrej Karpathy went viral, “vibe coding” became the buzzword of the year—or at least the first quarter. It means programming exclusively with AI, without looking at or touching the code. If it doesn’t work, you have the AI try again, perhaps with a modified prompt that explains what went wrong. Simon…
Our AI Codecon conference kicked off today with Coding with AI: The End of Software Development as We Know It. Here are my opening remarks introducing the series’ themes. You can reserve your seat for upcoming AI Codecon events here. Thanks so much for joining us today. We have over 20,000 people signed up for…
This is the first of four parts in this series. 1. ELI5: Understanding MCP Imagine you have a single universal plug that fits all your devices—that’s essentially what the Model Context Protocol (MCP) is for AI. MCP is an open standard (think “USB-C for AI integrations”) that allows AI models to connect to many different…
I thought I’d offer a few takeaways and reflections based on last week’s first AI Codecon virtual conference, Coding with AI: The End of Software Development as We Know It. I’m also going to include a few short video excerpts from the event. If you registered for Coding with AI or if you’re an existing…
A protein located in the wrong part of a cell can contribute to several diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, cystic fibrosis, and cancer. But there are about 70,000 different proteins and protein variants in a single human cell, and since scientists can typically only test for a handful in one experiment, it is extremely costly and…
Google DeepMind has once again used large language models to discover new solutions to long-standing problems in math and computer science. This time the firm has shown that its approach can not only tackle unsolved theoretical puzzles, but improve a range of important real-world processes as well. Google DeepMind’s new tool, called AlphaEvolve, uses the…
Imagine a radiologist examining a chest X-ray from a new patient. She notices the patient has swelling in the tissue but does not have an enlarged heart. Looking to speed up diagnosis, she might use a vision-language machine-learning model to search for reports from similar patients. But if the model mistakenly identifies reports with both…
Starting in July, MIT’s Shaping the Future of Work Initiative in the Department of Economics will usher in a significant new era of research, policy, and education of the next generation of scholars, made possible by a gift from the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Foundation. In recognition of the gift and the expansion…
Six months ago I attended the largest gathering of chiefs of police in the US to see how they’re using AI. I found some big developments, like officers getting AI to write their police reports. Today, I published a new story that shows just how far AI for police has developed since then. It’s about…