In the spring of 2021, climate scientists were stumped. The global economy was just emerging from the covid-19 lockdowns, but for some reason the levels of methane—a greenhouse gas emitted mainly through agriculture and fossil-fuel production—had soared in the atmosphere…
Any motorist who has ever waited through multiple cycles for a traffic light to turn green knows how annoying signalized intersections can be. But sitting at intersections isn’t just a drag on drivers’ patience — unproductive vehicle idling could contribute…
Four new faculty members join the School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P) this fall, offering the MIT community creativity, knowledge, and scholarship in multidisciplinary roles. “These individuals add considerable strength and depth to our faculty,” says Hashim Sarkis, dean of…
Last week, Mark Zuckerberg declared that Meta is aiming to achieve smarter-than-human AI. He seems to have a recipe for achieving that goal, and the first ingredient is human talent: Zuckerberg has reportedly tried to lure top researchers to Meta…
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. OpenAI has finally released open-weight language models The news: OpenAI has finally released its first open-weight large language…
Artificial intelligence is changing the way businesses store and access their data. That’s because traditional data storage systems were designed to handle simple commands from a handful of users at once, whereas today, AI systems with millions of agents need…
OpenAI has finally released its first open-weight large language models since 2019’s GPT-2. These new “gpt-oss” models are available in two different sizes and score similarly to the company’s o3-mini and o4-mini models on several benchmarks. Unlike the models available…
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. These protocols will help AI agents navigate our messy lives A growing number of companies are launching AI…
OpenAI has given itself a dual mandate. On the one hand, it’s a tech giant rooted in products, including of course ChatGPT, which people around the world reportedly send 2.5 billion requests to each day. But its original mission is…
M.C. Escher’s artwork is a gateway into a world of depth-defying optical illusions, featuring “impossible objects” that break the laws of physics with convoluted geometries. What you perceive his illustrations to be depends on your point of view — for…