Forbes reporter Martina Castellanos spotlights Edwin Chen '08, founder of Surge AI, as one of the 10 youngest billionaires on the 2025 Forbes 400 list. After working in machine learning, Chen saw “the lack of quality training data for AI,” and “launched Surge AI in 2020 to fix the problem,” writes Castellanos.
Prof. Dylan Hadfield-Menell speaks with CNN reporter Hadas Gold about the need for AI safeguards and increased education on large language models. “The way these systems are trained is that they are trained in order to give responses that people judge to be good,” explains Hadfield-Menell.
Prof. David Autor speaks with David Pogue of CBS Sunday Morning about how AI is impacting the labor market, in particular opportunities for entry-level job seekers. “My view is there is great potential and great risk,” Autor explains. “I think that it's not nearly as imminent in either direction as most people think." On the impacts for young job seekers, Autor emphasizes that “this is really a concern. Judgment, expertise, it's acquired slowly. It's possible that we could strip out so much of the supporting work, that people never get the expertise. I don't think it's an insurmountable concern. But we shouldn't take for granted that it will solve itself."
Prof. Andrew Lo speaks with Wall Street Journal reporter Cheryl Winokur Munk about how AI tools could be used to help people with financial planning. Winokur Munk writes that Lo recommends providing “just enough information to get relevant answers. And leave out highly personal details like your name, address, salary, employer or specific assets…as such details put people at risk should the AI be compromised.” Lo also advises “trying several AI platforms,” writes Winokur Munk. And “the advice should be run by a professional, trusted family or friends. Be a bit skeptical and double-check with humans.”
Researchers at MIT have found that generative AI “not only repeats the same irrational tendencies of humans during the decision making process but also lacks some of the positive traits that humans do possess,” reports Tamsin Gable for Forbes. “This led the researchers to suggest that AI cannot replace many tasks and that human expertise remains important,” adds Gable.
MIT Dean of Digital Learning Cynthia Breazeal SM ’93, ScD ’00, Profs. Regina Barzilay and Priya Donti, and a number of MIT alumni have been named to Time’s TIME 100 AI 2025 list. The list spotlights “innovators, leaders, and thinkers reshaping our world through groundbreaking advances in artificial intelligence.”
Prof. Marzyeh Ghassemi speaks with Boston Globe reporter Hiawatha Bray about her work uncovering issues with bias and trustworthiness in medical AI systems. “I love developing AI systems,” says Ghassemi. “I’m a professor at MIT for a reason. But it’s clear to me that naive deployments of these systems, that do not recognize the baggage that human data comes with, will lead to harm.”
In a video for CNN, graduate student Alex Kachkine explains his work developing a method using AI to create a reversible polymer film that could be used to restore damaged oil paintings, making the process faster than manual restoration. Kachkine explains that he hopes his work helps “get more paintings out of storage and into public view as there are many paintings that are damaged that I would love to see and it’s a real shame that there aren’t the resources necessary to restore them.”
Writing for the Financial Times, Prof. Carlo Ratti makes the case that “in a hotter world, trees should be considered more than decoration. This ancient infrastructure can cool not just our buildings but the cities themselves. And with AI, we can now plant better, with precision urban forestry. In a warming world, the smartest climate tech may be rooted in the ground — and it doesn’t strain the power grid.”
Noman Bashir, a fellow with MIT's Climate and Sustainability Consortium, speaks with AP reporter Caleigh Wells about how new AI data centers are impacting the country’s energy grid. “Since we are trying to build data centers at a pace where we cannot integrate more renewable energy resources into the grid, most of the new data centers are being powered by fossil fuels,” says Bashir.
Prof. Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL and “one of the world’s foremost thinkers on the intersection of machines and artificial intelligence,” shares her views on the promise of embodied intelligence, which would allow machines to adapt in real-time; the development of AI agents; and how the US can lead on the development of AI technologies with Aaron Mak of Politico. “The U.S. government has invested in energy grids, railroads and the internet. In the AI age, it must treat high-performance compute, data stewardship and model evaluation pipelines as public infrastructure as well,” Rus explains.
Graduate student Alex Kachkine speaks with New York Times reporter Ephrat Livni about his work creating a new AI technique for restoring paintings, and how his research on microchips helped inspire the development. Microchips “require very high degrees of precision,” Kachkine explains. “And it turns out a lot of the techniques we use to achieve that level of precision are applicable to art restoration.” Kachkine adds that he hopes conservators will be able to “leverage the benefits” of the techniques he gleaned from engineering to preserve “really valuable cultural heritage.”
Writing for The Guardian, Prof. Carlo Ratti highlights his work using “AI to compare footage of public spaces from the 1970s with recent video” from the same locations in Boston, New York and Philadelphia. “The findings are striking: people walk faster, linger less, and are less likely to meet up,” explains Ratti. “By using AI to study urban public spaces, we can gather data, pick out patterns and test new designs that could help us rethink, for our time, our modern versions of the agora– the market and main public gathering place of Athens.”
Using AI, researchers at MIT have developed new antibiotics for gonorrhoea and MRSA, two infections that are typically hard to treat. The team “trained the AI to help it learn how bacteria was affected by different molecular structures built of atoms in order to design new antibiotics,” writes Ruth Stainer for the Daily Mail. “[A]nything too similar to the current antibiotics available, or with the potential to be toxic to human beings, was eradicated.”
Researchers at MIT used AI to “design antibiotics that can tackle hard-to-treat infections gonorrhoea and MRSA,” reports ITV News. "Our work shows the power of AI from a drug design standpoint, and enables us to exploit much larger chemical spaces that were previously inaccessible,” says Prof. James Collins.