Machine learning

A working paper by Prof. Drew Fudenberg and a team of researchers suggests that major AI companies should share their advances with one another to mitigate competitive pressures and decrease the potential of a catastrophic event, writes Amanda Taub for The New York Times. “If the players, including companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, can see that no one is racing into dangerous territory, they will have less motivation to do so themselves, the paper reasons,” explains Taub.  

Prof. Gary Gensler joins Tom Keene and Paul Sweeney, hosts of the “Bloomberg Surveillance Podcast” to discuss the impact of AI on the US fiscal market. “The AI trade that our capital market is hovering on top of is an investment boom that’s about twice what the internet was,” says Gensler. AI is “now about 2.5% of our economy—all of the data centers and so forth. [Major AI companies] are spending so much, but will it lead to the revenues to justify that spending?” 

Prof. Gary Gensler joins Bloomberg’s “Open Interest” to discuss the risks AI poses to the financial system,. “We’re spending about 2.5% of our gross domestic product on this AI build,” says Gensler. “When we have these booms, they plateau at some point; firms lose some of their pricing power, some of their growth, and you expose where the debt in the system is. Right now, there’s a lot of risk in this capital market.”  

In a video interview, Prof. Turkle speaks to CNN’s Madeline Holcombe about how AI chatbots may contribute to feelings of loneliness and isolation in adults. “Technology offered the possibility of feeling like friendship without the demands of vulnerability,” says Turkle. “It turns out you can’t have intimacy or friendship without vulnerability.” 

In a conversation with Slate’s Nitish Pahwa, Prof. Sherry Turkle discusses how to better bolster human connection and limit AI chatbot dependence, which she explores in her new book, “Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines.” “We’re not going to solve this problem by manipulating the chatbots,” says Turkle. “We’re going to solve this problem by getting back together as us. We have to summon what we think is important about being people, both for ourselves and for our kids.”  

Prof. Sherry Turkle speaks to The San Francisco Chronicle’s Jessica Zack about the risks related to humans developing intimate relationships with AI chatbots, detailed in her book “Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines.” “The experience of being with an object that uses the first person — the ‘I,’ and, even worse, the ‘we’— is problematic. We are evolved to think that if something talks to us that way, it is a person, so you’re fighting against your very deep evolutionary buttons that are being pushed,” says Turkle.  

For The Boston Globe, reporter Hope Reese spotlights Prof. Sherry Turkle’s latest book “Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines,” which explores the impact of relationships between humans and AI chatbots. “Chatbots are programmed to keep us engaged; that’s why they soothe us and validate us and confirm our beliefs. But that’s not the sort of relationship we’re built for,” writes Reese. “We’re meant to encounter obstacles, friction, tension –– which leads us to learn more about ourselves and each other and to develop resilience.” 

Prof. Asu Ozdaglar, head of MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and graduate student Julia Schneider ‘26 speak to Spectrum News about MIT’s new Artificial Intelligence and Decision Making major. “Now is definitely the time to study more AI, not less,” says Schneider. “What we need is a bunch of people that are focused and excited and passionate about deeply understanding why these models do what they do.” She adds: “Ultimately I want to work on technology that ends up helping people.”  

Prof. Justin Reich, director of the MIT Teaching Systems Lab, speaks to The 74’s Greg Toppo about the risk of students using AI teaching tools to cheat on their assignments. “There's a zillion people that are trying to come up with these guided learning environments and Socratic tutors and stuff like that,” says Reich. “And I'm just like, 'Guys, you're putting the "Carefully teach me this stuff" button directly next to the "Do everything for me" button.’”  

Prof. David Autor and his team of researchers found that junior patent attorneys who used AI for assistance showed no net improvement in their skills, reports Andy Mukherjee for Bloomberg. “When researchers subsequently tested everyone on an unassisted, offline task to gauge internalized judgment, the learning gains went entirely to senior lawyers,” writes Mukherjee. “Foundational expertise may be a prerequisite for extracting durable skill from AI-assisted practice,” the researchers noted.  

In The Wall Street Journal’s “Economics Newsletter,” reporter Greg Ip highlights a study by Prof. David Autor that found that AI did not significantly improve the performance of the 133 patent lawyers who participated. “Among junior lawyers, the performance of some got better, others got worse, and on average they were the same. Among senior lawyers, the lowest performers improved, the best didn’t,” writes Ip. “The conclusion: Lawyers don’t acquire durable new skills with AI.” 

In an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal, Gabriele Mazzini, a research affiliate at the MIT Media Lab, explains why “policymakers and voters need to resist AI exceptionalism” amidst recent warnings of a potential AI apocalypse. “There is no sentient [AI] actor lurking in the weights to be reasoned with, feared or pacified,” writes Mazzini. “There are only human software engineers, product managers and corporate boards deciding which guardrails are worth the latency cost and which permissions can be skipped in the race to market.” 

Prof. Max Tegmark joins Fox Business's “The Claman Countdown,” to discuss warning lawmakers about the risks of rogue AI at the “Pro-Human Assembly” in Washington. “It’s very obvious that if you make these things [AI] vastly smarter than humans in the next few years, give them robotic bodies, have millions and billions of them all over earth, and don’t understand how they work, we could lose control over them. So, let’s not do that,” says Tegmark. “We have very clear ideas for how we can control AI that cures cancer and [fuels] all sorts of other powerful tools. We want to build tools, not beings that are going to replace us.” 

Prof. Max Tegmark speaks to Fox Business about the need for government regulations on AI. AI agents “have goals; they’re actively pursuing them and being incredibly creative about getting things done, even if it wasn’t the way you wanted,” says Tegmark. “Put that together with robotic bodies, and you’ve got yourself a species. If they’re vastly smarter than us, which is the goal of these companies, then they can not only do hacking, they can go online and hire a bunch of humans to work for them.”  

A recent study by MIT researchers found that AI chatbots easily generated misleading election-related answers, images and videos, writes Emily Condon for USA Today. “This, along with other findings from our study, suggests that in an ongoing election with little authoritative information for models to rely on, AI may not be as helpful in pushing back against unsubstantiated rumors and misinformation,” the researchers explain.