This article originally appeared on Medium. Tim O’Brien has given us permission to repost here on Radar. When you’re working with AI tools like Cursor or GitHub Copilot, the real power isn’t just having access to different models—it’s knowing when to use them. Some jobs are OK with Auto. Others need a stronger model. And…
The MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) recently celebrated the launch of the MIT–MBZUAI Collaborative Research Program, a new effort to strengthen the building blocks of artificial intelligence and accelerate its use in pressing scientific and societal challenges. Under the five-year agreement, faculty, students, and research…
Chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude have experienced a meteoric rise in usage over the past three years because they can help you with a wide range of tasks. Whether you’re writing Shakespearean sonnets, debugging code, or need an answer to an obscure trivia question, artificial intelligence systems seem to have you covered. The source of…
Teaching developers to work effectively with AI means building habits that keep critical thinking active while leveraging AI’s speed. But teaching these habits isn’t straightforward. Instructors and team leads often find themselves needing to guide developers through challenges in ways that build confidence rather than short-circuit their growth. (See “The Cognitive Shortcut Paradox.”) There are…
For Priya Donti, childhood trips to India were more than an opportunity to visit extended family. The biennial journeys activated in her a motivation that continues to shape her research and her teaching. Contrasting her family home in Massachusetts, Donti — now the Silverman Family Career Development Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and…
Kids have always played with and talked to stuffed animals. But now their toys can talk back, thanks to a wave of companies that are fitting children’s playthings with chatbots and voice assistants. It’s a trend that has particularly taken off in China: A recent report by the Shenzhen Toy Industry Association and JD.com predicts…
Last week OpenAI released Sora, a TikTok-style app that presents an endless feed of exclusively AI-generated videos, each up to 10 seconds long. The app allows you to create a “cameo” of yourself—a hyperrealistic avatar that mimics your appearance and voice—and insert other peoples’ cameos into your own videos (depending on what permissions they set). …
MIT engineers have developed a printable aluminum alloy that can withstand high temperatures and is five times stronger than traditionally manufactured aluminum. The new printable metal is made from a mix of aluminum and other elements that the team identified using a combination of simulations and machine learning, which significantly pruned the number of possible…
Tokamaks are machines that are meant to hold and harness the power of the sun. These fusion machines use powerful magnets to contain a plasma hotter than the sun’s core and push the plasma’s atoms to fuse and release energy. If tokamaks can operate safely and efficiently, the machines could one day provide clean and…
Just a few years ago, AI coding assistants were little more than autocomplete curiosities—tools that could finish your variable names or suggest a line of boilerplate. Today, they’ve become an everyday part of millions of developers’ workflows, with entire products and startups built around them. Depending on who you ask, they represent either the dawn…