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.”
A working paper co-authored by Prof. Kate Kellogg found that building organization wide AI tools created “substantial work beyond employees’ day-to-day jobs,” writes Fortune’s Bilin Lin. “That work included trial-and-error experimentation, reviewing and refining outputs with colleagues across departments, and continually adapting solutions as AI models evolved. Much of that work remained invisible to leadership,” notes Lin.
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.
BBC News reporter Chris Baraniuk highlights MIT startup Alsym Energy, which is developing sodium-ion batteries. Drew Buckley, chief executive at ESS Tech, “points out that sodium ion batteries could help distribute renewable energy to data centers,” writes Baraniuk. “And those batteries should be cheaper to run than lithium-ion alternatives, since they are not expected to require as much cooling.”
Prof. Dennis Whyte, co-founder of MIT spinoff Commonwealth Fusion Systems, joins GBH’s Hakeem Oluseyi, host of “Particles of Thought,” to discuss the future of fusion technology, which he describes as “the engine of the universe.” The energy power density of fusion “is about ten million times higher than gasoline,” says Whyte. “The cost and the accessibility to it [fusion] is not driven by access to fuel, but to the technology and the manufacturing capability of building the objects that would actually deliver fusion. We need a new discipline to tell us about what that is going to cost as a practical energy source—which we are starting to do now.”
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.”
MIT researchers found that AI assisted work leads to the ‘diversity collapse’ of a brand’s voice, and users that rely on AI to do their thinking lose skills over time, highlights Forbes’ Michelle O'Connor. “Judgment, taste and the instinct to catch when something’s off isn’t a soft skill you can afford to lose,” writes O’Connor. “The MIT data is the first hard evidence of that.”
In his latest book, “Disposable Workers: The Transformation of Employment,” Prof. Emeritus Paul Osterman finds that 35% of the U.S. workforce is made up of disposable workers hired with the “implicit understanding that they won’t be around for long,” writes Fortune’s Nick Lichtenberg. Employers “do not invest in the great bulk of their workforce” in the way that they used to, says Osterman.
Prof. Daron Acemoglu discusses the impact of AI models on jobs in an article by CNBC’s Trevor Laurence Jockims. “If AI continues to be developed as an automation technology, there will be more impacts. Right now, we don’t have many easy-to-use applications relevant for a large number of tasks/industries,” says Acemoglu. “Once these are developed, the labor market effects will be multiplied.”