In 2024, a Democratic congressional candidate in Pennsylvania, Shamaine Daniels, used an AI chatbot named Ashley to call voters and carry on conversations with them. “Hello. My name is Ashley, and I’m an artificial intelligence volunteer for Shamaine Daniels’s run for Congress,” the calls began. Daniels didn’t ultimately win. But maybe those calls helped her…
Most organizations feel the imperative to keep pace with continuing advances in AI capabilities, as highlighted in a recent MIT Technology Review Insights report. That clearly has security implications, particularly as organizations navigate a surge in the volume, velocity, and variety of security data. This explosion of data, coupled with fragmented toolchains, is making it…
In 2025 AI reshaped how teams think, build, and deliver software. We’re now at a point where “AI coding assistants have quickly moved from novelty to necessity [with] up to 90% of software engineers us[ing] some kind of AI for coding,” Addy Osmani writes. That’s a very different world to the one we were in…
To make large language models (LLMs) more accurate when answering harder questions, researchers can let the model spend more time thinking about potential solutions. But common approaches that give LLMs this capability set a fixed computational budget for every problem, regardless of how complex it is. This means the LLM might waste computational resources on simpler…
In the future, tiny flying robots could be deployed to aid in the search for survivors trapped beneath the rubble after a devastating earthquake. Like real insects, these robots could flit through tight spaces larger robots can’t reach, while simultaneously dodging stationary obstacles and pieces of falling rubble. So far, aerial microrobots have only been…
When AI systems were just a single model behind an API, life felt simpler. You trained, deployed, and maybe fine-tuned a few hyperparameters. But that world’s gone. Today, AI feels less like a single engine and more like a busy city—a network of small, specialized agents constantly talking to each other, calling APIs, automating workflows,…
OpenAI is testing another new way to expose the complicated processes at work inside large language models. Researchers at the company can make an LLM produce what they call a confession, in which the model explains how it carried out a task and (most of the time) owns up to any bad behavior. Figuring out…
A new computer modeling tool developed by an MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) research team will help infrastructure planners working in the electricity and other energy-intensive sectors better predict and prepare for future needs and conditions as they develop plans for power generation capacity, transmission lines, and other necessary infrastructure. The tool could reduce the amount…
Imagine having a continuum soft robotic arm bend around a bunch of grapes or broccoli, adjusting its grip in real time as it lifts the object. Unlike traditional rigid robots that generally aim to avoid contact with the environment as much as possible and stay far away from humans for safety reasons, this arm senses…
The debate about open source AI has largely featured open weight models. But that’s a bit like arguing that in the PC era, the most important goal would have been to have Intel open source its chip designs. That might have been useful to some people, but it wouldn’t have created Linux, Apache, or the…