Welcome to M5BMachine 5-Minute Briefing

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,...

Many organizations rushed into generative AI, only to see pilots fail to deliver value. Now, companies want measurable outcomes—but how do you design for success? At Mistral AI, we partner with global industry leaders to co-design tailored AI solutions that solve their most difficult problems. Wheth...

In the three years since ChatGPT’s explosive debut, OpenAI’s technology has upended a remarkable range of everyday activities at home, at work, in schools—anywhere people have a browser open or a phone out, which is everywhere. Now OpenAI is making an explicit play for scientists. In October, the fi...

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. How do tech companies check if their users are kids? This question has taken on new urgency recently thanks to growing concern about the dangers that can arise wh...

MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here. In the final weeks of 2025, the battle over regulating artificial intelligence in the US reached a boiling point. On December 11, a...

New research detects hidden evidence of mistaken correlations — and provides a method to improve accuracy.

With support from the Siegel Family Endowment, the newly renamed MIT Siegel Family Quest for Intelligence investigates how brains produce intelligence and how it can be replicated to solve problems.

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. I decided to go to CES kind of at the last minute. Over the holiday break, contacts from China kept messaging me about their travel plans. After the umpteenth “Se...

While the growing energy demands of AI are worrying, some techniques can also help make power grids cleaner and more efficient.

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Sometimes AI feels like a niche topic to write about, but then the holidays happen, and I hear relatives of all ages talking about cases of chatbot-induced psycho...

MIT graduate student C Jacob Payne reimagines historic architecture and invents new possibilities at the intersection of AI and design.

MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here. In an industry in constant flux, sticking your neck out to predict what’s coming next may seem reckless. (AI bubble? What AI bubble...

If the past 12 months have taught us anything, it’s that the AI hype train is showing no signs of slowing. It’s hard to believe that at the beginning of the year, DeepSeek had yet to turn the entire industry on its head, Meta was better known for trying (and failing) to make the metaverse…

MIT community members made headlines with key research advances and their efforts to tackle pressing challenges.

CSAIL researchers find even “untrainable” neural nets can learn effectively when guided by another network’s built-in biases using their guidance method.

Can I ask you a question: How do you feel about AI right now? Are you still excited? When you hear that OpenAI or Google just dropped a new model, do you still get that buzz? Or has the shine come off it, maybe just a teeny bit? Come on, you can be honest with…...

When the ABB FIA Formula E World Championship launched its first race through Beijing’s Olympic Park in 2014, the idea of all-electric motorsport still bordered on experimental. Batteries couldn’t yet last a full race, and drivers had to switch cars mid-competition. Just over a decade later, Formula...