The process of discovering molecules that have the properties needed to create new medicines and materials is cumbersome and expensive, consuming vast computational resources and months of human labor to narrow down the enormous space of potential candidates. Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT could streamline this process, but enabling an LLM to understand and…
PLAID is a multimodal generative model that simultaneously generates protein 1D sequence and 3D structure, by learning the latent space of protein folding models. The awarding of the 2024 Nobel Prize to AlphaFold2 marks an important moment of recognition for the of AI role in biology. What comes next after protein folding? In PLAID, we…
On Tuesday, California state senator Steve Padilla will make an appearance with Megan Garcia, the mother of a Florida teen who killed himself following a relationship with an AI companion that Garcia alleges contributed to her son’s death. The two will announce a new bill that would force the tech companies behind such AI companions…
Agents are the talk of the AI industry—they’re capable of planning, reasoning, and executing complex tasks like scheduling meetings, ordering groceries, or even taking over your computer to change settings on your behalf. But the same sophisticated abilities that make agents helpful assistants could also make them powerful tools for conducting cyberattacks. They could readily…
Due to the inherent ambiguity in medical images like X-rays, radiologists often use words like “may” or “likely” when describing the presence of a certain pathology, such as pneumonia. But do the words radiologists use to express their confidence level accurately reflect how often a particular pathology occurs in patients? A new study shows that…
Renewable power sources have seen unprecedented levels of investment in recent years. But with political uncertainty clouding the future of subsidies for green energy, these technologies must begin to compete with fossil fuels on equal footing, said participants at the 2025 MIT Energy Conference. “What these technologies need less is training wheels, and more of…
In February 2024, Reddit struck a $60 million deal with Google to let the search giant use data on the platform to train its artificial intelligence models. Notably absent from the discussions were Reddit users, whose data were being sold. The deal reflected the reality of the modern internet: Big tech companies own virtually all…
Imagine a coffee company trying to optimize its supply chain. The company sources beans from three suppliers, roasts them at two facilities into either dark or light coffee, and then ships the roasted coffee to three retail locations. The suppliers have different fixed capacity, and roasting costs and shipping costs vary from place to place….
On March 27, the results of the first clinical trial for a generative AI therapy bot were published, and they showed that people in the trial who had depression or anxiety or were at risk for eating disorders benefited from chatting with the bot. I was surprised by those results, which you can read about…
Pattie Maes, the Germeshausen Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT and head of the Fluid Interfaces research group within the MIT Media Lab, has been awarded the 2025 ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award. She will accept the award at CHI 2025 in Yokohama, Japan this April. The Lifetime Research Award is given to individuals whose research…