Microsoft has a new plan to prove what’s real and what’s AI online
AI-enabled deception now permeates our online lives. There are the high-profile cases you may easily spot, like when White House officials recently shared a manipulated image of a protester in Minnesota and then mocked those asking about it. Other times, it slips quietly into social media feeds and ...
Google DeepMind wants to know if chatbots are just virtue signaling
Google DeepMind is calling for the moral behavior of large language models—such as what they do when called on to act as companions, therapists, medical advisors, and so on—to be scrutinized with the same kind of rigor as their ability to code or do math. As LLMs improve, people are asking them to p...
To be human is, fundamentally, to be a forecaster. Occasionally a pretty good one. Trying to see the future, whether through the lens of past experience or the logic of cause and effect, has helped us hunt, avoid being hunted, plant crops, forge social bonds, and in general survive in a world that d...
Personalization features can make LLMs more agreeable
The context of long-term conversations can cause an LLM to begin mirroring the user’s viewpoints, possibly reducing accuracy or creating a virtual echo-chamber.
The past year has marked a turning point for Chinese AI. Since DeepSeek released its R1 reasoning model in January 2025, Chinese companies have repeatedly delivered AI models that match the performance of leading Western models at a fraction of the cost. Just last week the Chinese firm Moonshot AI ...
AI agents are a risky business. Even when stuck inside the chatbox window, LLMs will make mistakes and behave badly. Once they have tools that they can use to interact with the outside world, such as web browsers and email addresses, the consequences of those mistakes become far more serious. That m...
AI algorithm enables tracking of vital white matter pathways
Opening a new window on the brainstem, a new tool reliably and finely resolves distinct nerve bundles in live diffusion MRI scans, revealing signs of injury or disease.
A “QuitGPT” campaign is urging people to cancel their ChatGPT subscriptions
In September, Alfred Stephen, a freelance software developer in Singapore, purchased a ChatGPT Plus subscription, which costs $20 a month and offers more access to advanced models, to speed up his work. But he grew frustrated with the chatbot’s coding abilities and its gushing, meandering replies. T...
3 Questions: Using AI to help Olympic skaters land a quint
MIT Sports Lab researchers are applying AI technologies to help figure skaters improve. They also have thoughts on whether five-rotation jumps are humanly possible.
For a few days this week the hottest new hangout on the internet was a vibe-coded Reddit clone called Moltbook, which billed itself as a social network for bots. As the website’s tagline puts it: “Where AI agents share, discuss, and upvote. Humans welcome to observe.” We observed! Launched on Januar...
MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here. Every time OpenAI, Google, or Anthropic drops a new frontier large language model, the AI community holds its breath. It ...
3 Questions: Using AI to accelerate the discovery and design of therapeutic drugs
Professor James Collins discusses how collaboration has been central to his research into combining computational predictions with new experimental platforms.
How generative AI can help scientists synthesize complex materials
MIT researchers’ DiffSyn model offers recipes for synthesizing new materials, enabling faster experimentation and a shorter journey from hypothesis to use.
Inside the marketplace powering bespoke AI deepfakes of real women
Civitai—an online marketplace for buying and selling AI-generated content, backed by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz—is letting users buy custom instruction files for generating celebrity deepfakes. Some of these files were specifically designed to make pornographic images banned by the...
The AI Hype Index: Grok makes porn, and Claude Code nails your job
Everyone is panicking because AI is very bad; everyone is panicking because AI is very good. It’s just that you never know which one you’re going to get. Grok is a pornography machine. Claude Code can do anything from building websites to reading your MRI. So of course Gen Z is spooked by what this…...
The US Department of Homeland Security is using AI video generators from Google and Adobe to make and edit content shared with the public, a new document reveals. It comes as immigration agencies have flooded social media with content to support President Trump’s mass deportation agenda—some of whic...
What AI “remembers” about you is privacy’s next frontier
The ability to remember you and your preferences is rapidly becoming a big selling point for AI chatbots and agents. Earlier this month, Google announced Personal Intelligence, a new way for people to interact with the company’s Gemini chatbot that draws on their Gmail, photos, search, and YouTube ...
From the Gemini Calendar prompt-injection attack of 2026 to the September 2025 state-sponsored hack using Anthropic’s Claude code as an automated intrusion engine, the coercion of human-in-the-loop agentic actions and fully autonomous agentic workflows are the new attack vector for hackers. In the A...
OpenAI’s latest product lets you vibe code science
OpenAI just revealed what its new in-house team, OpenAI for Science, has been up to. The firm has released a free LLM-powered tool for scientists called Prism, which embeds ChatGPT in a text editor for writing scientific papers. The idea is to put ChatGPT front and center inside software that scient...
“Dr. Google” had its issues. Can ChatGPT Health do better?
For the past two decades, there’s been a clear first step for anyone who starts experiencing new medical symptoms: Look them up online. The practice was so common that it gained the pejorative moniker “Dr. Google.” But times are changing, and many medical-information seekers are now using LLMs. Acco...
Yann LeCun’s new venture is a contrarian bet against large language models
Yann LeCun is a Turing Award recipient and a top AI researcher, but he has long been a contrarian figure in the tech world. He believes that the industry’s current obsession with large language models is wrong-headed and will ultimately fail to solve many pressing problems. Instead, he thinks we sh...