Industry

Fast Company’s Adele Peters highlights Firma Power, a clean energy developer co-founded by MIT alumni aimed at working with data centers to use clean alternatives to gas power. “We started the company with the hypothesis that despite the fact that 98% of what’s in the queue is wind, solar and storage, that’s not getting tapped as the default path to power for large loads—so there’s got to be some market frictions and barriers there,” says Jesse Jenkins SM ’14, PhD ’18.  

Prof. Emilio Castilla discusses the factors companies must consider when deploying AI to help in the hiring process, in an article by USA Today’s Greta Reich. “We should evaluate not only whether the algorithm predicts historical hiring decisions, but whether it helps identify candidates who subsequently perform well in the job,” writes Castilla. “The most exciting possibility is not simply that AI might help us find the best talent more efficiently. It is that AI might help us recognize talent that our traditional hiring practices have systematically overlooked.”  

Research Affiliate Paul Kedrosky joins The New York Times’ “The Ezra Klein Show” to discuss how the development of AI is creating an economic bubble, where asset prices are detached from economic reality. “We’re building it [AI] out like we were the railroads, like we were electrification, like we were the canals, like we were the interstate highways. And every one of those moments has led to overbuild,” says Kedrosky. “The reality is we’ve never seen a general-purpose technology that had such broad applicability, was adopted so quickly and was repricing labor at the same time.”  

Prof. Daron Acemoglu joins CNBC’s “Closing Bell” to discuss how AI could cause mass job displacement due to companies deploying rapidly advancing technologies. “AI’s capabilities are real and powerful, but human jobs are also complex. I don’t think you want AI to take over air traffic controller jobs right now; you don’t want AI to do CEO jobs,” says Acemoglu. “What we are seeing when these models escape their sandboxes and create havoc—it's not that they are necessarily super intelligent, it is that they don’t have judgement and they are optimized for certain narrow metrics and when you let them loose, they are going to do lots of unforeseeable things. You don’t want that in many jobs.”  

MIT startup LNK Energies has created a system to efficiently convert heavy-duty trucks from diesel to hydrogen, “slashing pollution and costs while shielding operators from the price spikes that result from geopolitical instability,” writes Tim De Chant for TechCrunch. “A lot of the reactors that LOHC (Liquid organic hydrogen carriers) companies have today are really large. They’re about the size of a shipping container,” says Alexis Huynh ‘24, cofounder of LNK. “We have shrunk that basically to the size of a mini fridge.” 

MIT spinout Cambridge Heavy Industries is developing a desktop-sized fusion reactor that can enable 50 to 80 experiments per day, writes TechCrunch’s Tim De Chant. “Cambridge Heavy’s fusion reactor uses lasers to compress a fuel target, similar to the groundbreaking experiment that proved controlled fusion reactions could produce more power than they consume,” notes De Chant. “But unlike other inertial confinement designs, Cambridge Heavy’s minimizes the number of lasers required to spark fusion.”  

Christina Qi ‘13 speaks to Entrepreneur’s Sherin Shibu about her experience starting her own hedge fund as an undergraduate, and co-founding and serving as the CEO of Databento, a market data platform. Qi encourages founders to support one another: “You can succeed and raise each other up and support each other, even as competitors in this industry,” she says. “That is absolutely possible. That’s what I have done and strive to do with a lot of our competitors in this space, with other founders.” 

Boston Globe reporter Jon Chesto spotlights the fall fair event held as part of the MIT x GE Vernova Energy & Climate Alliance, during which, GE Vernova CEO Scott Strazik shared his enthusiasm for hiring MIT graduates. “Something we talk a lot about inside Vernova is the world is changing very quickly but we need to change quicker and even faster than that so we can lead in the world,” says Strazik. “Over the last year-plus on this campus, we see a lot of opportunities for us to get better through bringing you into the organization.”  

Prof. Pat Pataranutaporn and graduate student Manuel Cherep speak to the Scientific American’s Mary Randolph about companies creating AI agents to assist users in personal tasks. “We have this narrative crisis about AI right now. There’s two opposite visions of the future, and while people worry about AI,” says Pataranutaporn, “there’s this cute AI tool that’s being released.” 

Hertha Metals, a startup founded by alumna Laureen Meroueh SM ’18, PhD ’20, “has developed a way to produce high-purity iron needed in the magnets used in everything from electric vehicles to humanoid robots,” writes reporter Stephanie Findlay for the Financial Times. “Hertha is breaking ground on a 10,000-tonne-a-year commercial facility today on the outskirts of Houston to produce the metal,” Findlay highlights. “The company plans to produce the first steel-grade iron in the fourth quarter of next year and start producing the high-purity iron by 2028.” 

MIT startup Alsym Energy, cofounded by Prof. Kripa Varanasi, has developed an alternative to lithium-ion batteries using sodium ions, writes Morgan Clendaniel for Fast Company. “The battery is nonflammable and nontoxic, allowing it to be placed in more sensitive areas and saving money on cooling systems that often have to be co-installed with large lithium batteries,” explains Clendaniel.  

Prof. Dennis Whyte joins Hakeem Oluseyi, host of GBH’s “Particles of Thought,” to “explore fusion's wildest applications” in space. “There are private companies now looking at ways to exploit fusion for space travel,” says Whyte. “There are also, simultaneously, companies which are looking at using the technology of fusion—particularly the plasma and magnetic technology, which were primarily developed from fusion to get significant improvements in propulsion technology as well.” 

Prof. Koroush Shirvan speaks to The New York Times’ Brad Plumer and Rebecca F. Elliott about the safety of companies increasing power levels in existing nuclear reactors. “We know a lot about the safety performance of these plants; the confidence is high there,” says Shirvan. Plumer and Elliot write that Shrivan added “some plants in the past have run into operational difficulties after upgrades. If, for instance, the higher power levels subjects equipment to more wear and tear, plants may have to be shut down more frequently for maintenance,” write Plumer and Elliott.  

In an interview with CBS News’ “60 Minutes,” Prof. Daron Acemoglu discusses his views on AI and how the technology could lead to worker displacement, without intervention. Concerns about AI and the labor market “should move us into thinking about what we can do because there is a lot we can do,” says Acemoglu. "Because the future is so uncertain, because the future is so much subject to our choice and agency, it is all the more important that we have this discussion." 

Prof. Dennis Whyte joins Hakeem Oluseyi, host of GBH’s “Particles of Thought,” to discuss cofounding MIT spinoff Commonwealth Fusion Systems from a class assignment that blossomed into actionable research. The students “were not saddled with conventional wisdom” about superconducting technology, says Whyte. In the class, “we were throwing all kinds of crazy ideas at the fridge on this and some of them stuck,” says Whyte. “I’ve had the privilege to see my students succeed. We [professors] have a job where we get an amazing privilege where we get to discover.”