Welcome to M5BMachine 5-Minute Briefing

The impact of artificial intelligence extends far beyond the digital world and into our everyday lives, across the cars we drive, the appliances in our homes, and medical devices that keep people alive. More and more, product engineers are turning to AI to enhance, validate, and streamline the desig...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. “Anyone wanna host a get together in SF and pull this up on a 100 inch TV?”  The author of that post on X was referring to an online intelligence dashboard follow...

The ongoing public feud between the Department of Defense and AI company Anthropic over its technology has raised a deep open question: does the law actually allow the US government to conduct mass surveillance on Americans? Surprisingly, the answer is not straightforward. More than a decade after E...

The approach could help engineers tackle extremely complex design problems, from power grid optimization to vehicle design.

Pull the plug! Pull the plug! Stop the slop! Stop the slop! For a few hours this Saturday, February 28, I watched as a couple hundred anti-AI protesters marched through London’s King’s Cross tech hub, home to the UK headquarters of OpenAI, Meta and Google DeepMind, chanting slogans and waving signs....

Burrowed in the alleys of Hongik-dong, a hushed residential neighborhood in eastern Seoul, is a faded stone-tiled building stamped “Korea Baduk Association,” the governing body for professional Go. The game is an ancient one, with sacred stature in South Korea.  But inside the building, rooms once f...

By providing holistic information on a cell, an AI-driven method could help scientists better understand disease mechanisms and plan experiments.

Strahinja Janjusevic brings an international perspective and US Naval Academy education to his graduate research in the MIT Technology and Policy Program.

Research from the MIT Center for Constructive Communication finds leading AI models perform worse for users with lower English proficiency, less formal education, and non-US origins.

By minimizing the need to drive around looking for a parking spot, this technique can save drivers up to 35 minutes — and give them a realistic estimate of total travel time.

Project AI Evidence will connect governments, tech companies, and nonprofits with world-class economists at MIT and across J-PAL's global network to evaluate and improve AI solutions.

Anton Cherepanov is always on the lookout for something interesting. And in late August last year, he spotted just that. It was a file uploaded to VirusTotal, a site cybersecurity researchers like him use to analyze submissions for potential viruses and other types of malicious software, often known...

Associate Professor Rafael Gómez-Bombarelli has spent his career applying AI to improve scientific discovery. Now he believes we are at an inflection point.

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Lots of influential people in tech last week were describing Moltbook, an online hangout populated by AI agents interacting with one another, as a glimpse into th...

For years, our newsroom has explored AI’s limitations and potential dangers, as well as its growing energy needs. And our reporters have looked closely at how generative tools are being used for tasks such as coding and running scientific experiments.  But how is AI actually being used in fields lik...

Removing just a tiny fraction of the crowdsourced data that informs online ranking platforms can significantly change the results.

MIT faculty join The Curiosity Desk to discuss football, math, Olympic figure skating, AI and the quest to cure ovarian cancer.

EnCompass executes AI agent programs by backtracking and making multiple attempts, finding the best set of outputs generated by an LLM. It could help coders work with AI agents more efficiently.

Torralba’s research focuses on computer vision, machine learning, and human visual perception.

The previous article in this series, “Rules fail at the prompt, succeed at the boundary,” focused on the first AI-orchestrated espionage campaign and the failure of prompt-level control. This article is the prescription. The question every CEO is now getting from their board is some version of: What...

The MIT senior will pursue a master’s degree at Cambridge University in the U.K. this fall.

Architecture students bring new forms of human-machine interaction into the kitchen.

WITEC is working to develop the first wearable ultrasound imaging system to monitor chronic conditions in real-time, with the goal of enabling earlier detection and timely intervention.

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. What would it take to convince you that the era of truth decay we were long warned about—where AI content dupes us, shapes our beliefs even when we catch the lie,...