Systems using artificial intelligence to enhance forecasting, planning, and decision-making in businesses have been proliferating in recent years, but in many cases, they lack the detailed, specific information about the organization itself, limiting the usefulness of those tools.  Devavrat Shah, a principal investigator at MIT’s Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), faculty member with…

Artificial intelligence has rapidly transformed software engineering. Generative AI and large language models (LLMs) can create huge volumes of code and documentation; machine-learning algorithms can monitor performance and detect security vulnerabilities. But when the task is to conceive, design, and make a complex physical system such as a jet engine, are those AI tools equally…

In May 2019, the government of Baltimore, Maryland, fell into chaos. Cybercriminals had locked the city out of many of its critical files and demanded payment to decrypt them. The city refused to pay ransom. The attack incapacitated a swath of services, including real estate transactions and bill payment, and recovery costs soared into the…

Robots walking down the street, surrounded by astounded onlookers, is an increasingly common sight. But these machines aren’t yet the do-it-all assistants you’d want working in a kitchen or factory, and a major bottleneck is data. Much like humans, robots learn best by experience. The challenge is that it’s labor-intensive and time-consuming to physically teach…

With the exploding popularity of generative artificial intelligence, many open-source models are now available online for anyone to adapt for their task, such as generating product renderings in a certain artistic style.  But these models also find their way into the hands of nefarious actors who may optimize them to produce illegal content, like hate…

Most people think of the waterfront as the edge of the city. A team of MIT researchers sees it as a dynamic, Lego-like construction site. Their new system, called “FloatForm,” is a swarm of small square robotic boats that assemble themselves into larger structures on the water, break apart, and reassemble into something new, all…

In today’s world, artificial intelligence chatbots such as ChatGPT and Claude can perform many functions, such as composing work emails and planning travel itineraries. These chatbots are systems built around large vision-language models (VLMs): AI trained on a massive dataset that includes books, websites, code, and images.  The AI algorithms are then refined on massive…

Professor Jesse Thaler has been named director of the MIT Laboratory for Nuclear Science (LNS), effective Aug. 1. He succeeds Professor Bolek Wyslouch, who directed LNS for the past decade. Thaler is a theoretical particle physicist who combines techniques from quantum field theory and machine learning to address outstanding questions in fundamental physics.  “In his…

As advanced medical technology gets closer to hitting consumer markets, the need for guardrails on protected usage should increase. What might begin as a neural implant to aid in communication could become a device used to police one’s innermost thoughts. Intrigued by the far-reaching benefits and risks of neural implants, Rachel Sava, a PhD candidate…

Without federal support for curiosity-driven research, the innovation and talent pipeline that has helped ensure our nation’s prosperity and safety could run dry, warned President Sally Kornbluth during a Washington Post Live event.  During “The Next Generation,” a panel discussion moderated by Washington Post reporter Zachary Goldfarb at The Washington Post’s “Building America Summit,” Kornbluth…

The deployment of automated software systems called AI agents has recently exploded. A November 2025 report by MIT Sloan School of Management and Boston Consulting Group found that 35 percent of surveyed businesses had already deployed AI agents, while another 44 percent planned to implement agentic AI soon.  To understand the fundamentals and potential impacts of…

The MIT Music Technology and Computation (MTC) Graduate Program — launched in fall 2024 as a collaboration between the Music and Theater Arts Section in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS), and the School of Engineering (SoE) — presented its inaugural MIT Music Technology Research Showcase on May 13. The event played…

“Beyond Data-Driven Aesthetics,” by MIT Architecture alumnus and researcher Alexandros Haridis, on view at the MIT Keller Gallery through June 30, examines 20th- and 21st-century efforts to transform computing into a medium for creative production and aesthetic judgment in architecture and the applied arts. Drawing on philosophy, mathematics, computer science, and design computation, the exhibition…

David Autor, the Daniel (1972) and Gail Rubinfeld Professor in the MIT Department of Economics, has been named head of the Department of Economics, effective July 1. “David is a world-class labor economist,” says Agustín Rayo, the Kenan Sahin Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. “He is also an individual of…

Imagine working at a warehouse or office sometime in the near future, and you’re asked to help a new trainee learn the basics of their job. The catch: It’s a robot. To teach them, you might want to play a game of “show and tell” — that is, physically showing how to do something a…

Over the past 80 years, America’s bold, sustained investment in scientific research, and the discoveries, ideas and innovations that flowed from it made America a world leader. The nation’s scientific leadership has been essential to our shared prosperity and national security, and delivered real benefits for all Americans. On June 16, Scientific American released a special…

Agentic workflows are artificial intelligence-powered software systems that chain together multiple models and external tools to tackle complicated tasks, like analyzing a video and answering questions about it. But the way these highly fragmented systems are designed and deployed often causes inefficiencies that can lead to wasted computation, energy, and cost.  To improve efficiency, researchers…

At the recent AI and Society Forum at MIT, experts from across the Institute discussed the potential benefits and dangers of technological innovation on labor, the nature of work, civil discourse, election administration, and other topics. The event featured individual research presentations and panel discussions, as well as a musical performance exploring the use of generative artificial…

A new chip developed by MIT researchers could help tiny, low-power UAVs avoid obstacles as they zip around tight corners inside an industrial HVAC system to check for gas leaks. The chip allows small autonomous robots and other battery-limited devices to construct detailed 3D maps of their environments in real-time using only about as much…

Companies working at the frontier of aerospace, energy, and computing are constantly looking for new materials to improve performance. But in order to understand how those materials will actually behave once they’re inside rockets or on computer chips, companies first have to make the material and then test it. That’s because even the most powerful…

On June 9, The Boston Globe released its 2026 “Tech Power Players” list, recognizing 50 influential local leaders in technology and business across Massachusetts. The list includes eight MIT affiliates including President Sally Kornbluth, Prof. Daniela Rus (director of CSAIL), Prof. Regina Barzilay, Prof. Yet-Ming Chiang, Prof. Max Tegmark, Ana Bakshi (executive director of the Martin…

Whether you’re playing poker against a single opponent or find yourself in a bidding war over a home purchase with another prospective buyer, you are operating under conditions of imperfect information. You know what cards you’re holding in the poker game, and you also know how much above the home’s asking price you can afford,…

An auto factory worker can remember the storage bin where she left a partly assembled component the night before, and quickly return to that spot to pick it up. But robots that may work side-by-side with her would struggle to develop and access this same type of “spatiotemporal” memory. Now, MIT researchers have developed a…

In May, the Initiative for New Manufacturing (INM) marked its first anniversary with MIT Manufacturing Week, four days of events that attracted more than 800 registrants including students, faculty, industry leaders, investors, entrepreneurs, and government officials to explore topics ranging from how companies are using AI on factory floors to the role of startups in…

Jinhua Zhao MCP ’04, SM ’04, PhD ’09 has been appointed head of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), effective July 1. Zhao is the Class of 1941 Professor of Cities and Transportation at MIT. In making the announcement, dean of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning Hashim Sarkis noted that Zhao is a…

In his 1927 paper, “A law of comparative judgment,” the American psychologist L. L. Thurstone proposed that when people select one option among multiple alternatives, they are picking the one that has the highest value to them, even though they cannot assign a particular number to that choice.  Thurstone was a pioneer of “psychometrics” —…

The Hertz Foundation announced that it awarded 2026 fellowships to three current MIT students as well as an incoming graduate student. They are: Annika Marschner, Alvin Q. Meng, Zachary S. Siegel, and Matthew Wanta. The prestigious science and technology award provides each recipient with five years of financial support — a stipend and full tuition equivalent — which gives…

The rise of artificial intelligence is riding on the back of an enormous data center expansion. Data centers are projected to account for anywhere from 9 to 17 percent of total electricity usage in the U.S. by the end of the decade. Today, around a third of data center electricity is devoted to cooling the…

It’s no secret that the last few years have seen a massive explosion in the use of artificial intelligence for general information-gathering. An even more recent trend, though, is how large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are increasingly being used for verifying and consuming news; reports from the Pew Research Center over the…

On April 30, the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing’s Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC) initiative hosted a full-day research symposium examining how artificial intelligence is shaping the world and its implications for society.  The symposium included research talks by SERC’s latest seed grant recipients on topics such as air pollution forecasting and responsible computer vision deployment, panels on AI…

MIT, in collaboration with Georgia State University and a growing network of educational institutions, has announced expanded work under PATH (Pathways for AI Training and Hiring) — a multiyear initiative designed to scale effective, affordable, industry-aligned AI training for entry-level and current workers, with a particular focus on transforming community colleges into engines powering an…

The MIT-led Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions (IAIFI) has received renewed support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for an additional five years, increasing annual funding from $4 million to $4.98 million. The renewal marks a new phase for IAIFI, which has spent its first five years building a research model and an…

In 2026, the hype for artificial intelligence agents is louder than ever before. These semi-autonomous programs can “think” and execute well-defined tasks in areas like customer service and software development, typically using language models (LMs). But fields like medical diagnosis and scientific discovery require them to inquire about a vast range of solutions in uncertain…

Tod Machover, the Muriel R. Cooper Professor of Music and Media, faculty director of the MIT Media Lab, and director of the Opera of the Future research group, will receive the George Peabody Medal for Outstanding Contributions to Music and Dance in America — the highest honor bestowed by the Peabody Institute of the Johns…

To accelerate and refine decision-making in a fast-paced, global marketplace, enterprises may deploy generative artificial intelligence models to help summarize and interpret the charts that often fill market summaries and financial reports. But even the latest vision-language models sometimes struggle with this task, since it requires a model to integrate visual, numerical, and linguistic understanding.…

MIT and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts announced plans to establish the Quantum Systems Laboratory (QSL) at MIT, which will be open to researchers across the region.  With the new funding from the state, which will match federal funding for quantum research already underway at MIT, the Institute aims to begin construction on the QSL facility this…

At any given time, technology does two things to employment: It replaces traditional jobs, and it creates new lines of work. Machines replace farmers, but enable, say, aeronautical engineers to exist. So, if tech creates new jobs, who gets them? How well do they pay? How long do new jobs remain new, before they become…

Among all of the possible chemical compounds, it’s estimated that between 1020 and 1060 may hold potential as small-molecule drugs. Evaluating each of those compounds experimentally would be far too time-consuming for chemists. So, in recent years, researchers have begun using artificial intelligence to help identify compounds that could make good drug candidates.  One of those researchers…

Justin Solomon, associate professor in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), has been appointed associate dean of engineering education in the MIT School of Engineering, effective July 1. In this new role, Solomon will focus on advancing innovation in engineering education across the school. He will help shape new pedagogical approaches…

MIT master’s student Sunshine Jiang ’25 and Rupert Li ’24 are recipients of this year’s Knight-Hennessy Scholarship. Now in its ninth year, the highly competitive scholarship provides up to three years of financial support for graduate studies at Stanford University.  Sunshine Jiang  ’25 Sunshine Jiang, from Hangzhou, China, graduated from MIT in 2025 with a…

MIT’s Universal Learning is a new initiative from MIT Open Learning designed to prepare learners everywhere to tackle complex global challenges through boundary-crossing thinking.  Universal Learning offerings combine subject matter expertise from MIT faculty and experts and Open Learning’s more than 25 years of innovation in online education to deliver a learning experience centered on…

“Artificial intelligence is not just for computer scientists anymore; it’s going to permeate every aspect of our lives and influence every business,” says MIT President Sally Kornbluth.  The world is reaching an inflection point with artificial intelligence: over half of U.S. adults use generative AI — with 12 percent using it daily at work — and 88…

When we hear about automation and artificial intelligence replacing jobs, it may seem like a tsunami of technology is going to wipe out workers broadly, in the name of greater efficiency. But a study co-authored by an MIT economist shows markedly different dynamics in the U.S. since 1980.  Rather than implement automation in pursuit of…

Gabriele Farina grew up in a small town in a hilly winemaking region of northern Italy. Neither of his parents had college degrees, and although both were convinced they “didn’t understand math,” Farina says, they bought him the technical books he wanted and didn’t discourage him from attending the science-oriented, rather than the classical, high…

The human brain remains one of the most fascinating and perplexing mysteries in medicine. Scientists still struggle to match neurological activity with brain function and detect problems early, slowing efforts to treat neurological disorders and other diseases. Beacon Biosignals is working to make sense of the brain by monitoring its activity while people sleep. The…

When she was a child, MIT senior Olivia Honeycutt would spend summers on her grandparents’ farm in rural Alabama outside Birmingham. The practical and cultural differences between farm and city life became more pronounced by comparison. “Life and the way we lived it slowed down on the farm,” she says. “It was a nice change…

“The thing that really struck me when I came to MIT and strikes me every single day is the stuff that’s going on here is amazing. The science, the engineering… every day I hear something that makes my jaw drop,” remarked President Sally Kornbluth during a live discussion with Lizzie O’Leary of Slate’s “What Next:…

In today’s hospitals and clinics, a dermatologist may use an artificial intelligence model for classifying skin lesions to assess if the lesion is at risk of developing into a cancer or if it is benign. But if the model is biased toward certain skin tones, it could fail to identify a high-risk patient. Perhaps one…

The following is a joint announcement by the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and IBM. IBM and MIT today announced the launch of the MIT-IBM Computing Research Lab, advancing their long-standing collaboration to shape the next era of computing. The new lab expands its scope to include quantum computing, alongside foundational artificial intelligence research, with…

A new method developed by MIT researchers can accelerate a privacy-preserving artificial intelligence training method by about 81 percent. This advance could enable a wider array of resource-constrained edge devices, like sensors and smartwatches, to deploy more accurate AI models while keeping user data secure. The MIT researchers boosted the efficiency of a technique known…

Due to the explosive growth of artificial intelligence, it is estimated that data centers will consume up to 12 percent of total U.S. electricity by 2028, according to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Improving data center energy efficiency is one way scientists are striving to make AI more sustainable. Toward that goal, researchers from MIT and…

Every year, the countries competing in the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) arrive with a booklet of their best, most original problems. Those booklets get shared among delegations, then quietly disappear. No one had ever collected them systematically, cleaned them, and made them available, not for AI researchers testing the limits of mathematical reasoning, and not…

Confidence is persuasive. In artificial intelligence systems, it is often misleading. Today’s most capable reasoning models share a trait with the loudest voice in the room: They deliver every answer with the same unshakable certainty, whether they’re right or guessing. Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have now traced that overconfidence…

MIT Associate Professor Jacob Andreas of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science [EECS] and MIT Associate Professor Brett McGuire of the Department of Chemistry have been selected as the winners of the 2026 Harold E. Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award. Established in 1982 as a permanent tribute to Institute Professor Emeritus Harold E. Edgerton’s great and enduring…

Artificial intelligence is already proving it can accelerate drug development and improve our understanding of disease. But to turn AI into novel treatments we need to get the latest, most powerful models into the hands of scientists. The problem is that most scientists aren’t machine-learning experts. Now the company OpenProtein.AI is helping scientists stay on…

The MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) was founded in 1950 in response to “a new era emerging from social upheaval and the disasters of war,” as outlined in the 1949 Lewis Committee Report.  The report’s findings emphasized MIT’s role and responsibility in the new nuclear age, which called for doubling down on…

The electricity to an island goes out. To find the break in the underwater power cable, a ship pulls up the entire line or deploys remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) to traverse the line. But what if an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) could map the line and pinpoint the location of the fault for a diver…

What makes work valuable? Michal Masny, the NC Ethics of Technology Postdoctoral Fellow in the MIT Department of Philosophy, investigates the role work plays in our lives and its impact on our well-being.  Masny sees numerous benefits to work, beyond a paycheck. It’s a space for people to develop excellence at something, make a social contribution,…

Training a large artificial intelligence model is expensive, not just in dollars, but in time, energy, and computational resources. Traditionally, obtaining a smaller, faster model either requires training a massive one first and then trimming it down, or training a small one from scratch and accepting weaker performance.  Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial…

MIT.nano has announced that 16 startups became active participants in its START.nano program in 2025, more than doubling the number of new companies from the previous year. Aimed at speeding the transition of hard-tech innovation to market, START.nano supports new ventures through the discounted use of MIT.nano shared facilities and a guided access to the…

To improve data center efficiency, multiple storage devices are often pooled together over a network so many applications can share them. But even with pooling, significant device capacity remains underutilized due to performance variability across the devices. MIT researchers have now developed a system that boosts the performance of storage devices by handling three major…

Today, there are 94 nuclear reactors operating in the United States, more than in any other country in the world, and these units collectively provide nearly 20 percent of the nation’s electricity. That is a major accomplishment, according to Dean Price, but he believes that our country needs much more out of nuclear energy, especially…

Artificial intelligence is increasingly being used to help optimize decision-making in high-stakes settings. For instance, an autonomous system can identify a power distribution strategy that minimizes costs while keeping voltages stable. But while these AI-driven outputs may be technically optimal, are they fair? What if a low-cost power distribution strategy leaves disadvantaged neighborhoods more vulnerable…

Designers, makers, and others often use 3D printing to rapidly prototype a range of functional objects, from movie props to medical devices. Accurate print previews are essential so users know a fabricated object will perform as expected. But previews generated by most 3D-printing software focus on function rather than aesthetics. A printed object may end…

In biology, defects are generally bad. But in materials science, defects can be intentionally tuned to give materials useful new properties. Today, atomic-scale defects are carefully introduced during the manufacturing process of products like steel, semiconductors, and solar cells to help improve strength, control electrical conductivity, optimize performance, and more. But even as defects have…

Growing up in Mexico and Texas, Mariano Salcedo ’25 couldn’t readily indulge his passion for creating music. “There are no bands in Mexican public schools,” he says. While some families could pay for instruments and lessons, others, like Salcedo’s, were less fortunate. “I’ve always loved music,” he continues. “I was a listener.”  Salcedo, the Alex…

Proteins are far more than nutrients we track on a food label. Present in every cell of our bodies, they work like nature’s molecular machines. They walk, stretch, bend, and flex to do their jobs, pumping blood, fighting disease, building tissue, and many other jobs too small for the eye to see. Their power doesn’t…

Inside a giant autonomous warehouse, hundreds of robots dart down aisles as they collect and distribute items to fulfill a steady stream of customer orders. In this busy environment, even small traffic jams or minor collisions can snowball into massive slowdowns. To avoid such an avalanche of inefficiencies, researchers from MIT and the tech firm…

Each spring, river herring populations migrate from Massachusetts coastal waters to begin their annual journey up rivers and streams to freshwater spawning habitat. River herring have faced severe population declines over the past several decades, and their migration is extensively monitored across the region, primarily through traditional visual counting and volunteer-based programs.  Monitoring fish movement and…

The next time you’re scrolling your phone, take a moment to appreciate the feat: The seemingly mundane act is possible thanks to the coordination of 34 muscles, 27 joints, and over 100 tendons and ligaments in your hand. Indeed, our hands are the most nimble parts of our bodies. Mimicking their many nuanced gestures has…

Artificial intelligence holds promise for helping doctors diagnose patients and personalize treatment options. However, an international group of scientists led by MIT cautions that AI systems, as currently designed, carry the risk of steering doctors in the wrong direction because they may overconfidently make incorrect decisions. One way to prevent these mistakes is to program…

The sense of support and community was palpable when Sojun Park, a postdoc at the MIT Center for International Studies (CIS), delivered a recent presentation on The Global Diffusion of AI Technologies and Its Political Drivers. The event, part of the CIS Global Research and Policy Seminar, filled the venue with audience members from across MIT.  “My…

From enhancing international business logistics to freeing up more hospital beds to helping farmers, MIT Professor Dimitris Bertsimas SM ’87, PhD ’88 summarized how his work in operations research has helped drive real-world improvements, while delivering the 54th annual James R. Killian Faculty Achievement Award Lecture at MIT on Thursday, March 19. Bertsimas also described…

Who benefits from artificial intelligence? This basic question, which has been especially salient during the AI surge of the last few years, was front and center at a conference at MIT on Wednesday, as speakers and audience members grappled with the many dimensions of AI’s impact. In one of the conferences’s keynote talks, journalist Karen…

The following is a joint announcement from the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, Hasso Plattner Institute, and Hasso Plattner Foundation. The MIT Morningside Academy for Design (MAD), MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI), and Hasso Plattner Foundation celebrated the launch of the MIT and HPI AI…

MIT researchers have spent more than a decade studying techniques that enable robots to find and manipulate hidden objects by “seeing” through obstacles. Their methods utilize surface-penetrating wireless signals that reflect off concealed items. Now, the researchers are leveraging generative artificial intelligence models to overcome a longstanding bottleneck that limited the precision of prior approaches.…

Large language models (LLMs) can generate credible but inaccurate responses, so researchers have developed uncertainty quantification methods to check the reliability of predictions. One popular method involves submitting the same prompt multiple times to see if the model generates the same answer. But this method measures self-confidence, and even the most impressive LLM might be…

The United States and China “are the two largest emitters of carbon in the world,” said Nicholas Burns, former U.S. ambassador to the People’s Republic of China, at a recent MIT seminar. “We need to work with each other for the good of both of our countries.”  During the MITEI Presents: Advancing the Energy Transition…

The early years of faculty members’ careers are a formative and exciting time in which to establish a firm footing that helps determine the trajectory of researchers’ studies. This includes building a research team, which demands innovative ideas and direction, creative collaborators, and reliable resources.  For a group of MIT faculty working with and on…

Characterized by weakened or damaged heart musculature, heart failure results in the gradual buildup of fluid in a patient’s lungs, legs, feet, and other parts of the body. The condition is chronic and incurable, often leading to arrhythmias or sudden cardiac arrest. For many centuries, bloodletting and leeches were the treatment of choice, famously practiced…

Curiosity-driven research has long sparked technological transformations. A century ago, curiosity about atoms led to quantum mechanics, and eventually the transistor at the heart of modern computing. Conversely, the steam engine was a practical breakthrough, but it took fundamental research in thermodynamics to fully harness its power.  Today, artificial intelligence and science find themselves at…

Young adults growing up in the attention economy — preparing for adult life, with social media and chatbots competing for their attention — can easily fall into unhealthy relationships with digital platforms. But what if chatbots weren’t mere distractions from real life? Could they be designed humanely, as moral partners whose digital goal is to…

MIT researchers have developed a generative artificial intelligence-driven approach for planning long-term visual tasks, like robot navigation, that is about twice as effective as some existing techniques. Their method uses a specialized vision-language model to perceive the scenario in an image and simulate actions needed to reach a goal. Then a second model translates those…

Just as Darwin’s finches evolved in response to natural selection in order to endure, the cells that make up a cancerous tumor similarly counter selective pressures in order to survive, evolve, and spread. Tumors are, in fact, complex sets of cells with their own unique structure and ability to change.  Today, artificial Intelligence and machine…

Joseph Paradiso thinks that the most engaging research questions usually span disciplines.  Paradiso was trained as a physicist and completed his PhD in experimental high-energy physics at MIT in 1981. His father was a photographer and filmmaker working at MIT, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, and the MITRE Corporation, so he grew up in a house where artists,…

In high-stakes settings like medical diagnostics, users often want to know what led a computer vision model to make a certain prediction, so they can determine whether to trust its output. Concept bottleneck modeling is one method that enables artificial intelligence systems to explain their decision-making process. These methods force a deep-learning model to use…

Many engineering challenges come down to the same headache — too many knobs to turn and too few chances to test them. Whether tuning a power grid or designing a safer vehicle, each evaluation can be costly, and there may be hundreds of variables that could matter. Consider car safety design. Engineers must integrate thousands…

During a summer internship at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Ivy Mahncke, an undergraduate student of robotics engineering at Olin College of Engineering, took a hands-on approach to testing algorithms for underwater navigation. She first discovered her love for working with underwater robotics as an intern at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in 2024. Drawn by the…

Reasoning large language models (LLMs) are designed to solve complex problems by breaking them down into a series of smaller steps. These powerful models are particularly good at challenging tasks like advanced programming and multistep planning. But developing reasoning models demands an enormous amount of computation and energy due to inefficiencies in the training process.…

Have you ever had an idea for something that looked cool, but wouldn’t work well in practice? When it comes to designing things like decor and personal accessories, generative artificial intelligence (genAI) models can relate. They can produce creative and elaborate 3D designs, but when you try to fabricate such blueprints into real-world objects, they…

Studying gene expression in a cancer patient’s cells can help clinical biologists understand the cancer’s origin and predict the success of different treatments. But cells are complex and contain many layers, so how the biologist conducts measurements affects which data they can obtain. For instance, measuring proteins in a cell could yield different information about the…

Originally from the small Balkan country of Montenegro, Strahinja (Strajo) Janjusevic says his life has unfolded in unexpected ways, for which he is deeply grateful. After graduating from high school, he was selected to represent his country in the United States, studying cyber operations and computer science at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.…

Large language models (LLMs) have been championed as tools that could democratize access to information worldwide, offering knowledge in a user-friendly interface regardless of a person’s background or location. However, new research from MIT’s Center for Constructive Communication (CCC) suggests these artificial intelligence systems may actually perform worse for the very users who could most…

By now, ChatGPT, Claude, and other large language models have accumulated so much human knowledge that they’re far from simple answer-generators; they can also express abstract concepts, such as certain tones, personalities, biases, and moods. However, it’s not obvious exactly how these models represent abstract concepts to begin with from the knowledge they contain. Now…

It happens every day — a motorist heading across town checks a navigation app to see how long the trip will take, but they find no parking spots available when they reach their destination. By the time they finally park and walk to their destination, they’re significantly later than they expected to be. Most popular…

Many of the latest large language models (LLMs) are designed to remember details from past conversations or store user profiles, enabling these models to personalize responses. But researchers from MIT and Penn State University found that, over long conversations, such personalization features often increase the likelihood an LLM will become overly agreeable or begin mirroring…

The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at MIT has awarded funding to eight new research studies to understand how artificial intelligence innovations can be used in the fight against poverty through its new Project AI Evidence. The age of AI has brought wide-ranging optimism and skepticism about its effects on society. To realize…

For more than a decade, MIT Associate Professor Rafael Gómez-Bombarelli has used artificial intelligence to create new materials. As the technology has expanded, so have his ambitions. Now, the newly tenured professor in materials science and engineering believes AI is poised to transform science in ways never before possible. His work at MIT and beyond…

James J. Collins, the Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering and Science at MIT and faculty co-lead of the Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health, is embarking on a multidisciplinary research project that applies synthetic biology and generative artificial intelligence to the growing global threat of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). The research project is…

The signals that drive many of the brain and body’s most essential functions — consciousness, sleep, breathing, heart rate, and motion — course through bundles of “white matter” fibers in the brainstem, but imaging systems so far have been unable to finely resolve these crucial neural cables. That has left researchers and doctors with little…