This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Every year, some 22,000 Americans a year are killed as a result of serious medical errors in hospitals, many of them on operating tables. There have been cases where surgeons have…
Boosting the performance of solar cells, transistors, LEDs, and batteries will require better electronic materials, made from novel compositions that have yet to be discovered. To speed up the search for advanced functional materials, scientists are using AI tools to identify promising materials from hundreds of millions of chemical formulations. In tandem, engineers are building…
The rise of generative AI, coupled with the rapid adoption and democratization of AI across industries this decade, has emphasized the singular importance of data. Managing data effectively has become critical to this era of business—making data practitioners, including data engineers, analytics engineers, and ML engineers, key figures in the data and AI revolution. Organizations…
At the end of May, OpenAI marked a new “first” in its corporate history. It wasn’t an even more powerful language model or a new data partnership, but a report disclosing that bad actors had misused their products to run influence operations. The company had caught five networks of covert propagandists—including players from Russia, China,…
The first time Teodor Grantcharov sat down to watch himself perform surgery, he wanted to throw the VHS tape out the window. “My perception was that my performance was spectacular,” Grantcharov says, and then pauses—“until the moment I saw the video.” Reflecting on this operation from 25 years ago, he remembers the roughness of…
Imagine a world in which some important decision — a judge’s sentencing recommendation, a child’s treatment protocol, which person or business should receive a loan — was made more reliable because a well-designed algorithm helped a key decision-maker arrive at a better choice. A new MIT economics course is investigating these interesting possibilities. Class 14.163…
We previously shared our insights on the tactics we have honed while operating LLM applications. Tactics are granular: they are the specific actions employed to achieve specific objectives. We also shared our perspective on operations: the higher-level processes in place to support tactical work to achieve objectives. But where do those objectives come from? That is the domain of strategy. Strategy answers…
When Tomás Vega SM ’19 was 5 years old, he began to stutter. The experience gave him an appreciation for the adversity that can come with a disability. It also showed him the power of technology. “A keyboard and a mouse were outlets,” Vega says. “They allowed me to be fluent in the things I did….
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Greetings from Switzerland! I’ve just come back from Geneva, which last week hosted the UN’s AI for Good Summit, organized by the International Telecommunication Union. The summit’s big focus was how AI can…
Let’s say you want to train a robot so it understands how to use tools and can then quickly learn to make repairs around your house with a hammer, wrench, and screwdriver. To do that, you would need an enormous amount of data demonstrating tool use. Existing robotic datasets vary widely in modality — some…