During the journey from the suburbs to the city, the tree canopy often dwindles down as skyscrapers rise up. A group of New England Innovation Academy students wondered why that is. “Our friend Victoria noticed that where we live in Marlborough there are lots of trees in our own backyards. But if you drive just…
MIT Technology Review’s How To series helps you get things done. Planning a vacation should, in theory, be fun. But drawing up a list of activities for a trip can also be time-consuming and stressful, particularly if you don’t know where to begin. Luckily tech companies have been competing to create tools that can help…
A new tool makes it easier for database users to perform complicated statistical analyses of tabular data without the need to know what is going on behind the scenes. GenSQL, a generative AI system for databases, could help users make predictions, detect anomalies, guess missing values, fix errors, or generate synthetic data with just a…
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. When ChatGPT was first released, everyone in AI was talking about the new generation of AI assistants. But over the past year, that excitement has turned…
This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. Can you spot a liar? It’s a question I imagine has been on a lot of minds lately, in the wake of various televised political debates. Research has…
Most AI-powered robots today use cameras to understand their surroundings and learn new tasks, but it’s becoming easier to train robots with sound too, helping them adapt to tasks and environments where visibility is limited. Though sight is important, for some of our daily tasks, sound is actually more helpful, like listening to onions sizzling…
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. The generative AI boom is built on scale. The more training data, the more powerful the model. But there’s a problem. AI companies have pillaged the internet for training data, and…
Melissa Choi has been named the next director of MIT Lincoln Laboratory, effective July 1. Currently assistant director of the laboratory, Choi succeeds Eric Evans, who will step down on June 30 after 18 years as director. Sharing the news in a letter to MIT faculty and staff today, Vice President for Research Ian Waitz…
AI music is suddenly in a make-or-break moment. On June 24, Suno and Udio, two leading AI music startups that make tools to generate complete songs from a prompt in seconds, were sued by major record labels alleging widespread copyright infringement. Sony Music, Warner Music Group, and Universal Music Group claim the companies made use…
As AI continues to advance at a rapid pace, developers are increasingly turning to AI Driven Development (AIDD) to build more intelligent and adaptive applications. However, using natural language prompts to describe complex behaviors to AI can be a real challenge. While natural language is expressive, it lacks the structure and efficiency needed to clearly…