Artificial intelligence

Prof. Daniel Huttenlocher, dean of MIT’s Schwarzman College of Computing, joins Fox News’ “Fox and Friends” to discuss his views on the role of human responsibility in AI’s evolution. “With conventional software, when you program something, you give the machine precise instructions of what to do, so the humans developing it have a much more concrete understanding of what it can and can’t do,” says Huttenlocher. “With an AI system instead, it’s learned much more general skills and what you tell it to do is achieve some sort of a goal, but you don’t tell it the specific way it should achieve that goal. We can’t control it [AI] in the same ways that we control traditional software, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t control it and that we can’t control it, it’s just different.” 

Prof. Gary Gensler joins CNBC’s “Squawk Box” to discuss the AI race and shares his suggestions for government regulations. “I do feel that there’s a need for more responsible regulation of artificial intelligence,” says Gensler. “These existential risks [conflicts of interest, explainability, and bias], however you measure them, are much harder to control because you’ve got the competition between Chinese model developers, [and] U.S. model developers.”  

The 2003 Cohn-Elkies method “for finding upper bounds on the density of sphere packings,” established by MIT Prof. Henry Cohn and Harvard University’s Noam Elkies, is highlighted by Jack Murtagh for the Scientific American. “Their recipe is almost mechanical: come up with a mathematical function, feed the function into their method, and an upper bound pops out,” writes Murtagh. “They provided the field with a machine: identify the right inputs, churn it through their method, and a breakthrough in sphere packing might emerge.” 

Prof. Dylan Hadfield-Menell speaks to The Boston Globe’s Joshua Miller about his concerns with the current state of AI systems and how they are optimized. “The parts [of AI systems] that are imitating the ways that humans use language, those parts of the systems actually are quite correctable. They’re still pretty unpredictable, but they do seem quite flexible,” says Hadfield-Menell. “On the other hand, there’s reinforcement learning, task-focused behavior, that can often be quite sticky. They [AI systems] seem to really want to push towards task completion.” He adds: “If you have a powerful optimization-driven system pointed at some goal, it can often do a lot of unexpected things that can have a lot of impact.” 

Prof. Shafi Goldwasser and Prof. Vinod Vaikuntanathan founded the Institute for Responsible Superintelligence (RESI), “to develop mathematical principles and protocols to ensure AI models behave as intended,” writes Aaron Pressman for The Boston Globe. “You patch them [AI models] up, you test them, you patch them to make sure that they can perform to the best ability, but also not do damage,” says Goldwasser. “That’s probably not enough attention, given the fact that these things are going to become what we call super intelligent.” 

Members of MassLive’s “25 Most Influential Innovators of 2026” list, which includes President Sally Kornbluth and a number of other MIT faculty and alumni, gathered at the MIT Museum to “discuss the forces shaping the future of innovation in Massachusetts,” writes reporter Tréa Lavery. “MIT Provost Anantha Chandrakasan said about half of undergraduate students at the school are studying some form of computing, and enrollment in those courses has gone up in recent years, prompting professors and administrators to rethink how they incorporate AI into their teaching,” writes Lavery.  

In an article for The Wall Street Journal, Prof. Daniel Huttenlocher, dean of MIT’s Schwarzman College of Computing writes that: “AI is an extremely powerful and beneficial technology. But accountability for its actions remains with the people and institutions that grant it the power to act, and so does everything that follows: the duty to justify the arrangement, to watch it, to correct it and to stop it when necessary.”  

MIT alumni Tom Brown ‘10, co-founder of Anthropic, and Edwin Chen ‘08, founder of Surge AI, are highlighted among the 10 youngest billionaires on the 2026 “Forbes 400 List,” by reporter Alicia Park. Brown “was lead author of the 2020 paper introducing GPT-3, the language model that demonstrated such systems could write fluently and triggered the current investment boom in artificial intelligence,” writes Park. Chen’s Surge AI, “employs people to label data, as well as rate and correct AI-generated answers to train models.”

Good Owners-dogGPT, a chatbot guide designed for dog parents that wasco-founded by alumni Darin Bellisario PhD ‘15 and Raja Rajcic ’20, is featured by The Boston Globe’s Marcela García. “What happens today when [dog owners] go looking for information? They go to Google,” says Bellisario. “You find dozens of videos and blog posts and articles that are either contradictory or outdated or inaccurate, or whatever the algorithm or the ranking wants to show you.” 

The Boston Globe’s Hiawatha Bray spotlights Prof. Max Tegmark speaking at the “Pro-Human Assembly” in Washington, an event advocating for government regulations on AI, sponsored by Tegmark’s Future of Life Institute. “We are here today because we know that what’s up next is a fork in the road,” said Tegmark at the assembly. “We know that the future of AI is not inevitable. It is for us to decide.”  

Members of the MIT community speak to Boston 25 News reporter Lisa Gresci about how they use AI, and their concerns with regulating the technology. Developers should consider, “how AI can help communities so [they are] not just building things, but are also deploying it [with purpose] out in the world,” says graduate student Anku Rani.  

Prof. John Sterman speaks with The Boston Globe Editorial Board about the potential impacts of AI on a variety of fields. The Editorial Board writes that Sterman sees “outcomes where AI can be harnessed to solve societal problems such as climate change, but, he said, first and foremost, that will take smarter government policies and incentives. A new simulator he helped develop, En-ROADS, allows users to explore AI’s potential impacts on climate change, positive and negative, depending on which path we choose.” 

MIT researchers found that users preferred to consult professionals over AI chatbots, except when they are feeling embarrassment or shame, writes Forbes’ Joe McKendrick. “When we seek advice from other people, we’re often reluctant to share embarrassing details because we have a fear of being judged,” the researchers write. “People are more likely to turn to AI models to get professional advice when they’re embarrassed, because the model doesn’t judge them.” 

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.”  

President Emeritus L. Rafael Reif joins Yahoo Finance’s Julie Hyman to discuss how new policies regarding student visas, coupled with cuts to federal funding for universities, are severely disrupting America’s innovation economy. “The whole innovation ecosystem we have in America has been the best since World War II and has created this tremendous economy for the country. A great deal of that economy has to do with federal funding of research, doing it in a nonpoliticized way, and having the best people come from other countries to America to study with us, and to learn with us,” says Reif. “All of that ecosystem is being affected, and that makes it very uncomfortable for the experts who came here, to be here, to study here, and to stay here.”