We’ve been bombarded with claims about how much generative AI improves software developer productivity: It turns regular programmers into 10x programmers, and 10x programmers into 100x. And even more recently, we’ve been (somewhat less, but still) bombarded with the other side of the story: METR reports that, despite software developers’ belief that their productivity has…
What can we learn about human intelligence by studying how machines “think?” Can we better understand ourselves if we better understand the artificial intelligence systems that are becoming a more significant part of our everyday lives? These questions may be deeply philosophical, but for Phillip Isola, finding the answers is as much about computation as…
AI and quantum technologies are dramatically reconfiguring how cybersecurity functions, redefining the speed and scale with which digital defenders and their adversaries can operate. The weaponization of AI tools for cyberattacks is already proving a worthy opponent to current defenses. From reconnaissance to ransomware, cybercriminals can automate attacks faster than ever before with AI. This…
We’ve been watching enterprises struggle with the same customer service paradox for years: They have all the technology in the world, yet a simple address change still takes three days. The problem isn’t what you think—and neither is the solution. Last month, I watched a colleague try to update their address with their bank. It…
With global power demand from data centers expected to more than double by 2030, the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) in September launched an effort that brings together MIT researchers and industry experts to explore innovative solutions for powering the data-driven future. At its annual research conference, MITEI announced the Data Center Power Forum, a targeted research effort for…
In this post, I’ll introduce a reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm based on an “alternative” paradigm: divide and conquer. Unlike traditional methods, this algorithm is not based on temporal difference (TD) learning (which has scalability challenges), and scales well to long-horizon tasks. We can do Reinforcement Learning (RL) based on divide and conquer, instead of temporal…
What exactly does word2vec learn, and how? Answering this question amounts to understanding representation learning in a minimal yet interesting language modeling task. Despite the fact that word2vec is a well-known precursor to modern language models, for many years, researchers lacked a quantitative and predictive theory describing its learning process. In our new paper, we…
× Predicting Ego-centric Video from human Actions (PEVA). Given past video frames and an action specifying a desired change in 3D pose, PEVA predicts the next video frame. Our results show that, given the first frame and a sequence of actions, our model can generate videos of atomic actions (a), simulate counterfactuals (b), and support…
Adoption of new tools and technologies occurs when users largely perceive them as reliable, accessible, and an improvement over the available methods and workflows for the cost. Five PhD students from the inaugural class of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab Summer Program are utilizing state-of-the-art resources, alleviating AI pain points, and creating new features and…
Much like the introduction of the personal computer, the internet, and the iPhone into the public sphere, recent developments in the AI space, from generative AI to agentic AI, have fundamentally changed the way people live and work. Since ChatGPT’s release in late 2022, it’s reached a threshold of 700 million users per week, approximately…