Sarah Alnegheimish’s research interests reside at the intersection of machine learning and systems engineering. Her objective: to make machine learning systems more accessible, transparent, and trustworthy. Alnegheimish is a PhD student in Principal Research Scientist Kalyan Veeramachaneni’s Data-to-AI group in MIT’s Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS). Here, she commits most of her energy…
Scientists at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard have re-engineered a compact RNA-guided enzyme they found in bacteria into an efficient, programmable editor of human DNA. The protein they created, called NovaIscB, can be adapted to make precise changes to the genetic code, modulate the…
Separating AI reality from hyped-up fiction isn’t always easy. That’s why we’ve created the AI Hype Index—a simple, at-a-glance summary of everything you need to know about the state of the industry. Large language models confidently present their responses as accurate and reliable, even when they’re neither of those things. That’s why we’ve recently seen…
While I prefer “AI native” to describe the product development approach centered on AI that we’re trying to encourage at O’Reilly, I’ve sometimes used the term “AI first” in my communications with O’Reilly staff. And so I was alarmed and dismayed to learn that in the press, that term has now come to mean “using…
The rise of artificial intelligence resurfaces a question older than the abacus: If we have a tool to do it for us, why learn to do it ourselves? The answer, argues MIT electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) Professor Devavrat Shah, hasn’t changed: Foundational skills in mathematics remain essential to using tools well, from knowing…
This is the second of four parts in this series. Part 1 can be found here. 4. The Architecture of MCP: Clients, Protocol, Servers, and Services How does MCP actually work under the hood? At its core, MCP follows a client–server architecture, with a twist tailored for AI-to-software communication. Let’s break down the roles: MCP…
MIT today launched its Initiative for New Manufacturing (INM), an Institute-wide effort to reinfuse U.S. industrial production with leading-edge technologies, bolster crucial U.S. economic sectors, and ignite job creation. The initiative will encompass advanced research, innovative education programs, and partnership with companies across many sectors, in a bid to help transform manufacturing and elevate its…
About six weeks ago, I sent an email to Satya Nadella complaining about the monolithic winner-takes-all architecture that Silicon Valley seems to envision for AI, contrasting it with “the architecture of participation” that had driven previous technology revolutions, most notably the internet and open source software. I suspected that Satya might be sympathetic because of…
Anthropic has announced two new AI models that it claims represent a major step toward making AI agents truly useful. AI agents trained on Claude Opus 4, the company’s most powerful model to date, raise the bar for what such systems are capable of by tackling difficult tasks over extended periods of time and responding…
On Dec. 21, 2022, just as peak holiday season travel was getting underway, Southwest Airlines went through a cascading series of failures in their scheduling, initially triggered by severe winter weather in the Denver area. But the problems spread through their network, and over the course of the next 10 days the crisis ended up…