Industry

Prof. Daron Acemoglu joins NPR’s Scott Simon to discuss Congress tackling affordability in the age of AI by increasing wages. Paying higher prices for goods “is much less of a burden when you see your own salary increase at the same rate or at a higher rate,” says Acemoglu. “When we need to create more jobs for people, create more wage growth opportunities for people, technology is going to make that harder. We have to create an agenda of steering AI in a more pro-worker direction so that rather than automate work, we get AI to actually help employers to find ways of using workers more productively, and that will be a pathway for encouraging firms to create more jobs.” 

For The Hill, Liberty Vittert Capito ‘10, cohost of MIT’s Data Science Podcast, advises individuals against confiding private information in AI chatbots. “A search query into google is just a few words, but a late-night confession, or a sensitive medical inquiry contains hundreds of words of context. It often specifies why the inquiry is being made. It illuminates exactly what users fear, whom they love, what they regret, their moods and their most intimate health issues,” writes Vittert Capito. “This is unlike anything data brokers have been selling for years and getting rich.” 

The conversational AI models developed by MIT spinout Liquid AI are being introduced in Mercedes-Benz cars, writes Isabelle Bousquette for The Wall Street Journal. “Liquid AI invented a new architecture known as liquid neural networks, adaptive and efficient systems inspired by the neural activity of worms known scientifically as C. elegans,” writes Bousquette. Using the Liquid AI models in vehicles instead of cloud-based AI systems could allow for more “privacy, speed and the ability to run without constant network connectivity.” 

Prof. Daron Acemoglu shares his insights on artificial intelligence and the future of work and education during “Ask an Economist,” a virtual event hosted by NPR’s “The Indicator from Planet Money.” “I think there are a lot of pro-teacher AI opportunities where you give better tools to teachers, but teachers still remain central to the learning experience of students,” says Acemoglu. AI “can individualize the teaching experience much more effectively and at low cost in a way that wasn't possible before. And that expands teacher expertise, expands teacher capabilities, enables them to perform new tasks, doesn't replace them, doesn't sideline them.” 

Forbes’ Amy Feldman spotlights Ossium, a startup that retrieves and cryopreserves bone marrow for use in life-saving procedures, co-founded by CEO Kevin Caldwell ‘08. “Ossium’s bone marrow has been used to treat blood cancer and, in one case, severe aplastic anemia, a rare and serious condition where the bone marrow stops making enough new red blood cells,” writes Feldman. “We want to make these blood and immune diseases a thing of the past,” says Caldwell.  

Prof. John Hansman speaks to Scientific American reporter Peter Hall about the development of self-flying cargo planes. “We’ve been flying unmanned air vehicles, or drones, of reasonably large size,” for a while, says Hansman. “A small quadcopter drone doesn’t have to have the level of redundancy that a large vehicle that could hurt people on the ground or carry people needs.” However, “there will always be some level of human supervision,” even if the safety pilot is taken out of the cockpit in the years to come, Hansman adds.  

Prof. Gary Gensler joins “Bloomberg Open Interest” to discuss what a change in the control of Congress could mean for financial regulation. “I think it will be a wide-ranging look at what the Trump administration has done to roll back protections for investors in our capital markets,” says Gensler. “Going further than [examining the shuttering of] the Consumer Protection Bureau, issues around housing and housing affordability I think are very much on Democrats’ minds. And then financial stability issues as well, whether it’s a close look at private credit and then what we might call the big AI trade—how everything is interconnected.”  

Northwood Space Corp., “a maker of critical ground infrastructure for satellites,” cofounded by CEO Bridgit Mendler MS ‘20, is highlighted by Bloomberg’s Edward Ludlow and Sana Pashankar. “Northwood builds phased-array antenna systems that use electronically steered beams to communicate with multiple satellites without the need for large, mechanically rotating dishes,” Ludlow and Pashankar note. “The company so far has deployed six ground sites on two continents and says it added new customers across U.S. government agencies and commercial space companies in addition to traditional satellite operators.”  

Forbes has named MIT Professional Education’s Applied AI for Digital Transformation as the best professional development course available, writes Doug Wintemute and Veronica Beagle. “Designed for senior executives and tech leaders, this course explores AI adoption frameworks and strategies. Upon completion, graduates receive 6.4 continuing education units (CEUs) and a certificate of completion from the renowned MIT Professional Education.”  

Mike Beigel ‘70, who invented Mu-Tron III, considered to be “the first commercial envelope filter pedal [that] allowed guitar players to achieve a synthesizer-like sound” used in popular 1970s music, has died at 79, reports Alex Williams for The New York Times. “The Mu-Tron III was the most renowned of several effects pedals that Mr. Beigel invented for Musitronics, a New Jersey-based company that he co-founded in 1972,” writes Williams. Musitronics, “produced a variety of sought-after pedals, including the Mu-Tron Octave Divider, Phasor, Flanger and Bi-Phase, which have been adopted by notables like Neil Young, Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins and John Frusciante, the Chili Peppers guitarist.” 

CodeSignal, co-founded by alumnus and CEO Tigran Sloyan, has developed Agentic Skills Intelligence, a new product that “uses AI agents to evaluate the skills people use in their work and links the findings to personalized practice,” writes Forbes’ Ray Ravaglia. CodeSignal has built an AI agent “for each domain in its job taxonomy, such as engineering and sales, along with agents for capabilities that cut across jobs, among them communication and AI literacy,” notes Ravaglia. “The agents draw on systems including Gong, Salesforce, and GitHub, and they score what they find against rubrics the company says are grounded in industrial-organizational psychology.” 

Principal Research Scientist Deepjyoti Deka speaks to MassLive’s Tréa Lavery about the type of information stored by data centers. “Anything, mostly, that you are using the computer for, that you are getting some information from, is housed in a data center,” says Deka. “A lot of it is active data handling, but some of it is also data storage.” 

Prof. Sanjay Sarma speaks to Bloomberg’s Saritha Rai about the difficulty of developing dexterous robots for use in the home versus developing factory machines for use in standardized plants. “Heavy work, hazardous tasks have long been the focus of automation,” says Sarma. “Robots seem to be following an evolutionary path–the finer the motor or cognitive skills required, the harder to automate.”  

Writing for Fortune, MIT Innovation Fellow David Siegel SM ’86, PhD ’91, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Stephen Henriques examine the timeline of the current investment boom in AI infrastructure. “The market may already have overbuilt relative to the payback window that data center financing assumes. Much of what corporate America spends on AI today funds exploratory pilots,” Siegel, Sonnenfeld and Henriques note. “A pullback to reassess is not only the likely next step, but a healthy one.”  

Arcaea, a biotech beauty company founded by CEO Jasmina Aganovic ‘09, has partnered with the actress and producer Jennifer Lawrence to develop mes°, a new haircare brand, reports Flavio Gomez for the Los Angelos Times. “A TED Talk by Aganovic, an MIT-trained chemical and biological engineer exploring how biology can open new possibilities in beauty, prompted the two to connect and eventually develop the brand,” notes Gomez. “Instead of treating each [hair] concern as an isolated problem, the brand looks to biology for ways to address it.”