Artificial intelligence

MIT researchers have developed an ultrasound wristband that can transmit a user’s motions to a robotic hand or a virtual environment, reports Mack Degeurin for Popular Science. “Volunteers wearing the device could direct the robotic hand to grab tennis balls, make hand signs, and even play notes on a piano,” Degeurin explains. “That same technique can also be applied to digital environments, which means future wearers could control a phone screen without ever touching it, or interact with virtual reality in ways that feel more immersive.” 

Prof. Adam Berinsky speaks with Washington Post reporter Shira Ovide about American’s relationship with AI and social media. “Berinsky said the unfavorable opinions about AI aren’t that bad compared with Americans’ low confidence in many institutions, including big business, Congress and newspapers,” writes Ovide. 

Prof. John Horton speaks with CNN reporter Harmeet Kaur about the use of the world “agentic” in describing AI. “My sense is that it’s a word that’s useful to describe software that acts a bit more like a person does,” says Horton. 

Writing for the Financial Times, Prof. Danielle Li examines the risks for highly skilled workers whose expertise is used as training data for AI systems. “As workers, people should think about how to use AI to expand their skills: whether by building complementary capabilities or by finding ways to scale their expertise through AI systems,” Li writes. “As citizens, they should press for policies that give workers clearer rights over the data generated by their work and compensation for it.” 

During his time as a visiting artist at the Media Lab, keyboardist Jordan Rudess worked with researchers from the Responsive Environments Group to develop “jam_bot, a machine learning model designed to emulate his playing style and improvise while performing alongside him,” reports Annie Sarlin for The Boston Globe. 

Visiting Senior Lecturer Paul McDonagh-Smith speaks with Newsweek reporter Adam Mills about how AI implementation across organizations can have impacts on business oversight and governance. “The organizations I’ve seen moving fastest have built governance systems early enough that they become a permission structure, rather than a constraint,” says McDonagh-Smith. 

A new essay by Profs. Daron Acemoglu, David Autor and Simon Johnson, has offered “a more hopeful vision for the future of human work,” in a world infused with AI, reports Greg Rosalsky for NPR’s Planet Money. The authors “spend much of the essay providing a thought-provoking analysis of how new technologies can affect human jobs in general,” writes Rosalsky. “In short, it's complicated. Yes, often they do kill jobs. Other times they can make jobs less lucrative by, for example, making those jobs easier to do — or ‘de-skilling’ them — which means the supply of workers who can do these jobs goes up and wages for the occupation can go down.” 

Researchers at MIT have developed an “AI-driven optimization method that works like ‘ChatGPT for spreadsheets’ – a tabular foundation model designed to handle spreadsheet-style data common in engineering design problems,” reports Gene Marks for Forbes. “The AI system identifies which design variables matter most and focuses search efforts on those, making problem solving less cumbersome,” writes Marks. 

Prof. Sara Beery speaks with Smithsonian Magazine reporter Mike Bock about the benefits of AI use in ecological research. “There’s an increasing need to build strong machine learning skills directly in the ecological community,” says Beery. “These students don’t need to be AI researchers. But they do need access to the skills to apply these techniques to their research problems.” 

Prof. Sherry Turkle speaks with Fortune reporter Jacqueline Munis about the risks of using generative AI to address human emotions, such as grief. 

Prof. Robert Langer, Prof. Giovanni Traverso and former postdoctoral fellow Thomas von Erlach founded Vivtex, a biotechnology startup that has “created a high-tech system called a ‘GI tract on a chip’ that uses robotics and AI to test how drugs move through the human digestive system,” reports Beth Treffeisen for Boston.com. “The technology allows Vivtex to quickly test thousands of drug formulations and predict how they will be absorbed in people, much more accurately than traditional lab methods.” 

Prof. Daron Acemoglu speaks with WBUR Here & Now host Scott Tong about the impact of AI on the white-collar job market and the economy. “The advances in AI models have been pretty impressive,” says Acemoglu. “But right now, much of this is still in the lab, so to speak, meaning it has not spread to the productive sector of the economy. We are not seeing massive job losses…but of course we should be planning for how these models will be used and what their impact should be.”

Profs. Robert Langer, Giovanni Traverso and former postdoctoral fellow Thomas von Erlach have founded Vivtex, a biotechnology startup specializing in “oral alternatives to drugs administered by injections,” reports Jonathan Satlzman for The Boston Globe. Vivtex, now working in collaboration with Novo Nordisk, is looking to develop a new class of “pills to treat obesity and diabetes,” explains Saltzman. 

Guide Labs, co-founded by Julius Adebayo SM ’15, SM ’16, PhD ’22, has debuted a large language model designed to make “its actions easily interpretable,” reports Tim Fernholz for Tech Crunch. “Every token produced by the model can be traced back to its origins in the LLM’s training data,” explains Fernholz. 

Prof. Daron Acemoglu speaks with Fortune reporter Jake Angelo about his work studying the “origins of economic and political decay,” and the need for the U.S. to crack down “on economic inequality and tempering with job destruction.” “If we go down this path of destroying jobs [and] creating more inequality, U.S. democracy is not going to survive,” says Acemoglu.