MIT Sloan School of Management

Prof. Gary Gensler speaks with “Bloomberg Surveillance” hosts Tom Keene and Paul Sweeney about how the current AI investment boom may impact the U.S. economy. “You can be positive about the technology and still say our capital markets tend to overfund in exuberance,” says Gensler. “I think that we will have a deceleration of this AI boom, and then some form of a reversal in the next 18 to 30 months. And the question really, to me, is a little bit about timing: when and then how deep it [the deceleration] is. I think the depth of it is going to be dependent on how much debt is in the system, where it is [and] who holds it.”  

In an interview with The Boston Globe’s Rebecca Spiess, Prof. Eric So discusses how AI affects different areas of human cognition, as detailed in his new book “The Collision: What AI Does to Us.” “So many people these days are just really focused on the productivity benefits of AI and what it can do for us. I think what people really should be thinking about is what AI is doing to us in the immediate term,” says So. “AI is changing who we are as thinkers, right now, in our day-to-day lives; in classrooms; in households; in boardrooms across the globe.” 

Prof. Daron Acemoglu joins “The Claman Countdown” on Fox Business to discuss the possibility that largescale deployment of AI could triple unemployment within the next decade. “There is so much uncertainty about AI,” says Acemoglu. “It’s very difficult to know exactly when we’re going to see the productivity gains, which will come, and when we’re going to see job losses, and whether we’ll actually see some job creation as well. But on the current path where AI is being prepared and developed as a labor replacing technology, I would be very worried that within the next ten years we’ll see a lot of jobs disappear.”  

For Manufacturing Dive, reporter Nathan Owens spotlights MIT’s Technologist Advanced Manufacturing Program (TechAMP), a 12-month-long program that combines online instruction with hands-on lab work to bridge the gap between technical engineering and management skills, designed for working technicians or operators. “Students gain foundational leadership, process control and systems thinking skills,” notes Owens. TechAMP has “really shown me how to communicate more, communicate problems more, communicate solutions more,” says Brian Coppenrath, who completed the program.  

Poets & Quants reporter Jeff Schmitt writes that MIT Sloan School of Management’s Assistant Dean Dawna Levenson has been honored as the “MBA Admissions Director of the Year,” by Poets & Quants. “Dawna brings a very human-first approach to MIT Sloan Admissions, deeply learning about our applicants as people and professionals, getting to know them through interviews, and understanding how they hope to make a difference in the world through their education,” says Sloan Dean Richard Locke. “She supports students throughout the admissions journey, providing guidance, helping them navigate the process, and pivoting, as needed, to support their matriculation.”  

The New Yorker’s Gideon Lewis-Kraus details how Morris Chang ’52, SM ’53 founded the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), “one of the most valuable tech companies globally” that “makes almost all of the world’s advanced [computer] chips.” “Chang proposed a semiconductor ‘foundry,’ which would do for pricey chips what its predecessors had done for cheap junk. At the time, however, the market didn’t exist,” writes Lewis-Kraus. “By the end of TSMC’s first decade, the company was bringing in a billion dollars in annual revenue.”  

Postdoctoral Associate Iman YeckehZaare speaks to El País reporter Jordi Pérez Colomé about his research on RentAHuman, a platform that allows AI agents to hire people to do physical labor. “RentAHuman has shown that many people are willing to sign up to be hired by AI agents. What it still hasn’t shown is that many AI agents are doing the hiring,” says YeckehZaare. “Listings posted by agents will increase as AI agents become capable of acting and paying on their own.”  

Prof. Emilio Castilla discusses the factors companies must consider when deploying AI to help in the hiring process, in an article by USA Today’s Greta Reich. “We should evaluate not only whether the algorithm predicts historical hiring decisions, but whether it helps identify candidates who subsequently perform well in the job,” writes Castilla. “The most exciting possibility is not simply that AI might help us find the best talent more efficiently. It is that AI might help us recognize talent that our traditional hiring practices have systematically overlooked.”  

Research Affiliate Paul Kedrosky joins The New York Times’ “The Ezra Klein Show” to discuss how the development of AI is creating an economic bubble, where asset prices are detached from economic reality. “We’re building it [AI] out like we were the railroads, like we were electrification, like we were the canals, like we were the interstate highways. And every one of those moments has led to overbuild,” says Kedrosky. “The reality is we’ve never seen a general-purpose technology that had such broad applicability, was adopted so quickly and was repricing labor at the same time.”  

Testing 1,000 synthetically generated client profiles against AI chatbots for investment advice, Prof. Andrew Lo and Research Affiliate Jillian Ross identified “heuristic collapse,” where chatbots based their recommendations almost entirely on self-reported risk tolerance, while ignoring income and other variables, writes Damilola Esebame for The Street. “Lo has recommended that investors use chatbots for orientation, leveraging them to frame questions, map out available options, and prepare for conversations with a human advisor rather than treating the output as a finished plan,” notes Esebame. 

At the STAT Summit, President Sally Kornbluth joined Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of the Science family of journals, for a panel moderated by STAT’s Anil Oza. During the conversation, Kornbluth emphasized the importance of curiosity-driven research and education at institutions like MIT, highlighting MIT for America, a new initiative aimed at ensuring learners and educators from Kindergarten through community college across the country have access to STEM education. “We want to both meet people where they are, give their kids the opportunity, and also make them understand us as people who care about their communities,” says Kornbluth.

In an opinion piece for The Boston Globe, graduate student Jonah Prousky shares his observations that students who use AI minimally, or not at all, for their writing, tend to score higher on their written work. “In this environment, where a professor or teaching assistant reads dozens of essays, one after another, AI-generated writing is not only easy to detect but can be terribly monotonous to read,” writes Prousky. “It’s the students who sound most like themselves, by contrast, who delight all the more.”  

Christina Qi ‘13 speaks to Entrepreneur’s Sherin Shibu about her experience starting her own hedge fund as an undergraduate, and co-founding and serving as the CEO of Databento, a market data platform. Qi encourages founders to support one another: “You can succeed and raise each other up and support each other, even as competitors in this industry,” she says. “That is absolutely possible. That’s what I have done and strive to do with a lot of our competitors in this space, with other founders.” 

Boston Globe reporter Jon Chesto spotlights the fall fair event held as part of the MIT x GE Vernova Energy & Climate Alliance, during which, GE Vernova CEO Scott Strazik shared his enthusiasm for hiring MIT graduates. “Something we talk a lot about inside Vernova is the world is changing very quickly but we need to change quicker and even faster than that so we can lead in the world,” says Strazik. “Over the last year-plus on this campus, we see a lot of opportunities for us to get better through bringing you into the organization.”  

Prof. Eric So joins Bloomberg’s “Businessweek Daily” to discuss his debut book “The Collision: What AI does to us,” which explores the intersection of AI and human cognition. “I think of AI as being a force multiplier, something that can really make us productive, but too often people are focused on just really the capability enhancements of AI without thinking about the other side of the ledger which is: ‘what is it taking from us in that exchange,’” says So. “It matters how we go about using the tool.”