Researchers at MIT have found that “AI agents can make the workplace more productive when fine-tuned for different personality types, but human co-workers pay a price in lost socialization,” reports Kaustuv Basu for Bloomberg. The researchers concluded “found that humans using AI raised their productivity by 60%—partly because those workers sent 23% fewer social messages,” writes Basu.
Hank Green – a YouTuber, science communicator, and author - addressed the 2025 graduating class during his commencement address at the OneMIT ceremony, encouraging students to “stay curious,” reports Emily Spatz for The Boston Globe. “Do. Not. Forget. How special and bizarre it is to get to live a human life,” said Green. “Something very special and strange is happening on this planet and it is you.”
Graduate students Anika Jane Beamer, Nanticha Ocharoenchai, Pratik Pawar and Paulina Rowińska write for GBH to highlight health care deserts in the Boston area. “There are no hospitals or emergency care facilities in Mattapan,” they write. “With the closure of Carney Hospital, the nearest emergency room is at Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital, over three miles away. Getting there can be difficult.”
Postdoc Isabella Loaiza speaks with ABC News reporter Max Zahn about her study examining how jobs and tasks across the U.S. economy shifted between 2016-2024. Loaiza and her colleagues found that “rather than dispense with qualities like critical thinking and empathy, workplace technology heightened the need for workers who exhibit those attributes,” Zahn explains. “It is true we’re seeing AI having an impact on white-collar work instead of more blue-collar work,” says Loaiza. “We found that jobs that are very human-intensive are probably more robust.”
Writing for The Boston Globe, graduate students Manuj Dhariwal SM '17 and Shruti Dhariwal SM '18 highlight new efforts to reframe the language used to describe the ways humans are interacting with AI technologies. “It is a subtle reframing, but one that we urgently need as AI systems become interwoven with our creative, social, and emotional worlds,” they write. “The point is not necessarily to choose one over the other — but to clearly distinguish one from the other.”
Postdoc Rohan Naidu and his colleagues have used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to examine galaxy MoM-z14, first spotted in 2023, reports Jonathan O’Callaghan for New Scientist. “Naidu and his colleagues confirmed MoM-z14 is the most distant galaxy yet,” writes Naidu. “The light we see now was emitted just 280 million years after the big bang, breaking the previous record by about 10 million years.”
The Boston Globe remembers James Santoro ’23; Karenna Groff ’22, MEng ’23; her father, Michael Groff, MD an executive MBA student at MIT’s Sloan School of Management; and three others who passed away in a plane accident earlier this week. “Both Karenna and James were tremendous contributors to their sport teams, the institution, and their local communities,” says G. Anthony Grant, MIT’s director of athletics and head of the Department of Athletics, Physical Education, and Recreation, adding: “We offer our sincere condolences and grieve with the Groff and Santoro families as well as their loved ones.” E. Antonio Chiocca, a friend of the Groff family, remembers Dr.Groff as, “Just a really nice guy, great family man. Just an amazing individual.”
Researchers at MIT have concluded that AI does not develop “value systems” over time, reports Kyle Wiggers for TechCrunch. “For me, my biggest takeaway from doing all this research is to now have an understanding of models as not really being systems that have some sort of stable, coherent set of beliefs and preferences,” says graduate student Stephen Casper. “Instead, they are imitators deep down who do all sorts of confabulation and say all sorts of frivolous things.”
Berly McCoy and Sushmita Pathak of NPR’s Short Wave spotlight research by postdoctoral associate Funing Li and his team on tornado occurrence. The researchers used “historical data to model and simulate the interaction between land and the atmosphere,” explains McCoy.
A new study by researchers at MIT and elsewhere explores “children’s exploitation of language ‘loopholes’ — instances in which kids technically do what adults ask of them but completely violate the true intent of the request,” reports Charlotte Hu for Scientific American. “Sometimes you don’t want to cooperate, but it might feel risky to outright refuse,” explains former postdoc Sophie Bridgers. “We started to be curious about the strategies [kids] used to handle this tension.”
Graduate student Cathy Fang speaks with CBS News reporter Lindsey Reiser about her research studying the effects of AI chatbots on people’s emotional well-being. Fang explains that she and her colleagues found that how the chatbot interacts with the user is important, “but also how the user interacts with the chatbot is equally important. Both influence the user’s emotional and social well-being.” She adds: “Overall, we found that extended use is correlated with more negative outcomes.”
A new proposal by graduate student Shayne Longpre and other AI researchers suggests “a new scheme supported by AI companies that gives outsiders permission to probe their models and a way to disclose flaws publicly,” reports Will Knight for Wired. “The authors suggest three main measures to improve the third-party disclosure process: adopting standardized AI flaw reports to streamline the reporting process; for big AI firms to provide infrastructure to third-party researchers disclosing flaws; and for developing a system that allows flaws to be shared between different providers,” writes Knight.
Writing for Fast Company, graduate student Sheng-Hung Lee and Devin Liddell of Teague highlight four types of AI technologies that could aid senior citizens in their homes. “To better understand how seniors want AIs and robots to help in their homes, we asked them,” they write. “We recruited seniors from the MIT AgeLab’s research cohort—each around 70 years old and in the early stages of retirement—and then engaged in wide-ranging conversations about their aspirations and fears about these technologies.”
Researchers from MIT and elsewhere estimate that “while 36% of U.S. private sector jobs were technically ‘exposed’ to automation through computer vision… it would only make economic sense for firms to pursue automation for 8% of all private sector jobs—just a quarter of those jobs labelled ‘exposed,’” report François Candelon, David Zuluaga Martínez and Etienne Cavin for Fortune.
Prof. Sara Seager, postdoctoral fellow Iaroslav Iakubivskyi and Claire Isabel Webb PhD '20 have designed Phainoterra, an imaginary planet “with a habitable sulfuric acid-based biochemistry” using “extensive scientific research and cross-checking against known physical precepts,” reports Leslie Katz for Forbes. The creation of Phainoterra is a part of “Proxima Kosmos, a new project that unites scientists, including one from NASA, with designers and sci-fi writers to create a speculative solar system consistent with the laws of astronomy and physics.”