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CSAIL researchers have discovered that a large frontier AI model can, without any specialized training, understand and fine-tune another AI model’s capabilities, reports Fortune’s Jeremy Kah. The research “could be a big breakthrough in interpretability—our ability to understand the internal ‘thought’ processes of large language models,” writes Kah. “That’s critical because interpretability is one of the ways we are hoping to keep AI agents under human control.”   

Prof. Gary Gensler joins “Bloomberg Open Interest” to discuss what a change in the control of Congress could mean for financial regulation. “I think it will be a wide-ranging look at what the Trump administration has done to roll back protections for investors in our capital markets,” says Gensler. “Going further than [examining the shuttering of] the Consumer Protection Bureau, issues around housing and housing affordability I think are very much on Democrats’ minds. And then financial stability issues as well, whether it’s a close look at private credit and then what we might call the big AI trade—how everything is interconnected.”  

Research Scientist Judah Cohen speaks to USA Today’s Doyle Rice and Dinah Voyles Pulver about the potential impacts of the sudden stratospheric warming (SSW), currently disrupting the polar vortex, that “could eventually lead to an outbreak of frigid air across much of the United States at some point over the next few months.” “Usually it takes two weeks (but recently it seems to take much longer) for the impacts of the SSW to impact our weather, so that puts it as early as late November but more likely in December and could even be delayed until January,” says Cohen. “The last El Niño in 2023-24 featured two SSWs and it was a very mild winter in the eastern U.S. and may have even been record mild. In short lots of uncertainty!” 

Prof. John Hansman speaks to Scientific American reporter Peter Hall about the development of self-flying cargo planes. “We’ve been flying unmanned air vehicles, or drones, of reasonably large size,” for a while, says Hansman. “A small quadcopter drone doesn’t have to have the level of redundancy that a large vehicle that could hurt people on the ground or carry people needs.” However, “there will always be some level of human supervision,” even if the safety pilot is taken out of the cockpit in the years to come, Hansman adds.  

Forbes’ Amy Feldman spotlights Ossium, a startup that retrieves and cryopreserves bone marrow for use in life-saving procedures, co-founded by CEO Kevin Caldwell ‘08. “Ossium’s bone marrow has been used to treat blood cancer and, in one case, severe aplastic anemia, a rare and serious condition where the bone marrow stops making enough new red blood cells,” writes Feldman. “We want to make these blood and immune diseases a thing of the past,” says Caldwell.  

Los Angelos Times reporter Mark Swed spotlights Prof. Tod Machover’s “already and not yet,” a new symphony that “handles democracy not as a done deal, but a series of scary questions — and doesn’t trust the heartless machines for answers.” “Already and not yet” challenges us to make the world more beautiful by looking deeply into ourselves,” writes Swed. The orchestral score treats “musicians as creative artists and the audience as capable of opening its collective mind.”  

Forbes has named MIT Professional Education’s Applied AI for Digital Transformation as the best professional development course available, writes Doug Wintemute and Veronica Beagle. “Designed for senior executives and tech leaders, this course explores AI adoption frameworks and strategies. Upon completion, graduates receive 6.4 continuing education units (CEUs) and a certificate of completion from the renowned MIT Professional Education.”  

William D. Nordhaus PhD ’67, a “Yale economist and Nobel laureate who tabulated the economic wreckage of carbon emissions and influenced climate policy across several presidential administrations,” has died at 85, reports The New York Times’ Lydia DePillis. Nordhaus developed a model over decades, “to balance climate change’s long-term damage with the costs required to contain it,” that has “underpinned dozens of regulations around the world aimed at limiting fossil fuels and seeded the ground for a new field of research that bridges the gap between economics and earth science,” writes DePillis.  

Northwood Space Corp., “a maker of critical ground infrastructure for satellites,” cofounded by CEO Bridgit Mendler MS ‘20, is highlighted by Bloomberg’s Edward Ludlow and Sana Pashankar. “Northwood builds phased-array antenna systems that use electronically steered beams to communicate with multiple satellites without the need for large, mechanically rotating dishes,” Ludlow and Pashankar note. “The company so far has deployed six ground sites on two continents and says it added new customers across U.S. government agencies and commercial space companies in addition to traditional satellite operators.”  

Prof. John Urschel speaks to The New Yorker’s Rivka Galchen about AI being used as a tool for teaching and research in the field of mathematics. “I would say what I call the more scientist approach [to new technology] is being focused on trying to push the frontier of things as far as we can as quickly as we can,” says Urschel. “And the artist perspective is, ‘let me do something beautiful and enjoyable and manipulate these things,’ and the act of doing this is really, you know, a joyful thing.” 

CNN reporter Hadas Gold meets with Prof. Adam Berinsky and Prof. Chara Podimata to learn more about their new tool that tracks how popular AI chatbots source their information and respond to questions related to the midterm elections. “Even if people do not necessarily say that they trust AI, they like what AI gives them, which is a single answer,” says Berinsky. “What worries me is that the average voter, someone who might know a little about politics, but doesn’t know the details, is going to get this definitive answer [from an AI chatbot] that might be based on a different stew of information.”

Alumna Thapanee Techajareonvikul, CEO and president of Berli Jucker, is honored as one of Forbes Asia’s Power Businesswomen 2026, writes reporter Rana Wehbe Watson. Techajareonvikul is “keen to promote gender equality at the company [Berli Jucker], where today more than half the 61,000 workforce is female,” notes Wehbe Watson. “In the top management positions women make up 53%,” says Techajareonvikul.  

Prof. Daron Acemoglu joins Bloomberg’s “Mishal Husain Show” to discuss his latest book, “What Happened to Liberal Democracy: Remaking a Politics of Shared Prosperity,” as it relates to democracy in the age of AI and social media. “The thing that gives me hope is that humans are very adaptable,” says Acemoglu. “People, even in this polarized world, have a deep sense of fairness, around [which] we can come together. There are so many shared moral values between the different sides of the aisle in the U.K., [and] the U.S. Polarization, bad leadership [and] social media have obscured them.” 

Writing for Forbes, alumnus Paul Hsieh discusses radiologists employing rapidly evolving AI tools to help deliver diagnoses. “Radiologists are willing to employ AI tools that have been statistically validated to provide reliable diagnoses, even if we don’t yet fully understand how those tools work,” writes Hsieh. “But radiologists are not content to stop there. We also continually seek to improve genuine human understanding of how AI works in our field as a matter of professional responsibility for ourselves and for our patients.”