In the United States and around the world, democracy is under threat. Anti-democratic attitudes have become more prevalent, partisan polarization is growing, misinformation is omnipresent, and politicians and citizens sometimes question the integrity of elections. With this backdrop, the MIT Department of Political Science is launching an effort to establish a Strengthening Democracy Initiative. In…
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. In AI research, everyone seems to think that bigger is better. The idea is that more data, more computing power, and more parameters will lead to models that are more powerful….
This article is from The Debrief with Mat Honan, MIT Technology Review’s weekly newsletter from its editor in chief. To receive it every Friday, sign up here. In case you missed the memo, we are barreling toward the next big consumer device category: smart glasses. At its developer conference this week, Meta (née Facebook) introduced a positively mind-blowing…
Have you ever wanted to travel through time to see what your future self might be like? Now, thanks to the power of generative AI, you can. Researchers from MIT and elsewhere created a system that enables users to have an online, text-based conversation with an AI-generated simulation of their potential future self. Dubbed Future You,…
In 1994, Florida jewelry designer Diana Duyser discovered what she believed to be the Virgin Mary’s image in a grilled cheese sandwich, which she preserved and later auctioned for $28,000. But how much do we really understand about pareidolia, the phenomenon of seeing faces and patterns in objects when they aren’t really there? A new study…
Imagine having to straighten up a messy kitchen, starting with a counter littered with sauce packets. If your goal is to wipe the counter clean, you might sweep up the packets as a group. If, however, you wanted to first pick out the mustard packets before throwing the rest away, you would sort more discriminately,…
A new, multidisciplinary MIT graduate program in music technology and computation will feature faculty, labs, and curricula from across the Institute. The program is a collaboration between the Music and Theater Arts Section in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS); Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) in the School of Engineering;…
Deep-learning models are being used in many fields, from health care diagnostics to financial forecasting. However, these models are so computationally intensive that they require the use of powerful cloud-based servers. This reliance on cloud computing poses significant security risks, particularly in areas like health care, where hospitals may be hesitant to use AI tools…
Humane Intelligence, an organization focused on evaluating AI systems, is launching a competition that challenges developers to create a computer vision model that can track hateful image-based propaganda online. Organized in partnership with the Nordic counterterrorism group Revontulet, the bounty program opens September 26. It is open to anyone, 18 or older, who wants to…
The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Ai2), a research nonprofit, is releasing a family of open-source multimodal language models, called Molmo, that it says perform as well as top proprietary models from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. The organization claims that its biggest Molmo model, which has 72 billion parameters, outperforms OpenAI’s GPT-4o, which is estimated…