What if uncertainty wasn’t something to simply endure but something to actively exploit? The convergence of Nassim Taleb’s antifragility principles with generative AI capabilities is creating a new paradigm for organizational design powered by generative AI—one where volatility becomes fuel for competitive advantage rather than a threat to be managed. The Antifragility Imperative Antifragility transcends…
The U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (DoE/NNSA) recently announced that it has selected MIT to establish a new research center dedicated to advancing the predictive simulation of extreme environments, such as those encountered in hypersonic flight and atmospheric re-entry. The center will be part of the fourth phase of NNSA’s Predictive Science Academic Alliance…
Anyone who’s used AI to generate code has seen it make mistakes. But the real danger isn’t the occasional wrong answer; it’s in what happens when those errors pile up across a codebase. Issues that seem small at first can compound quickly, making code harder to understand, maintain, and evolve. To really see that danger,…
We can’t not talk about power these days. We’ve been talking about it ever since the Stargate project, with half a trillion dollars in datacenter investment, was floated early in the year. We’ve been talking about it ever since the now-classic “Stochastic Parrots” paper. And, as time goes on, it only becomes more of an…
In Silicon Valley’s imagined future, AI models are so empathetic that we’ll use them as therapists. They’ll provide mental-health care for millions, unimpeded by the pesky requirements for human counselors, like the need for graduate degrees, malpractice insurance, and sleep. Down here on Earth, something very different has been happening. Last week, we published a…
Earlier this year, when my colleague Casey Crownhart and I spent six months researching the climate and energy burden of AI, we came to see one number in particular as our white whale: how much energy the leading AI models, like ChatGPT or Gemini, use up when generating a single response. This fundamental number remained…
I’ve been in a few recent conversations about whether to use Apache Beam on its own or run it with Google Dataflow. On the surface, it’s a tooling decision. But it also reflects a broader conversation about how teams build systems. Beam offers a consistent programming model for unifying batch and streaming logic. It doesn’t…
Yichao “Peak” Ji is one of MIT Technology Review’s 2025 Innovators Under 35. Meet the rest of this year’s honorees. When Yichao Ji—also known as “Peak”—appeared in a launch video for Manus in March, he didn’t expect it to go viral. Speaking in fluent English, the 32-year-old introduced the AI agent built by Chinese startup Butterfly…
Artificial intelligence optimization offers a host of benefits for mechanical engineers, including faster and more accurate designs and simulations, improved efficiency, reduced development costs through process automation, and enhanced predictive maintenance and quality control. “When people think about mechanical engineering, they’re thinking about basic mechanical tools like hammers and … hardware like cars, robots, cranes, but mechanical…
3D printing has come a long way since its invention in 1983 by Chuck Hull, who pioneered stereolithography, a technique that solidifies liquid resin into solid objects using ultraviolet lasers. Over the decades, 3D printers have evolved from experimental curiosities into tools capable of producing everything from custom prosthetics to complex food designs, architectural models,…