For pregnant women, ultrasounds are an informative (and sometimes necessary) procedure. They typically produce two-dimensional black-and-white scans of fetuses that can reveal key insights, including biological sex, approximate size, and abnormalities like heart issues or cleft lip. If your doctor wants a closer look, they may use magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which uses magnetic fields…
In early 2024, a striking deepfake fraud case in Hong Kong brought the vulnerabilities of AI-driven deception into sharp relief. A finance employee was duped during a video call by what appeared to be the CFO—but was, in fact, a sophisticated AI-generated deepfake. Convinced of the call’s authenticity, the employee made 15 transfers totaling over…
MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here. It’s been a big year for video generation. In the last nine months OpenAI made Sora public, Google DeepMind launched Veo 3, the video startup Runway…
Generative AI has the potential to transform the finance function. By taking on some of the more mundane tasks that can occupy a lot of time, generative AI tools can help free up capacity for more high-value strategic work. For chief financial officers, this could mean spending more time and energy on proactively advising the…
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…
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…
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…