Technology

Seeing AI as a collaborator, not a creator

April 23, 2025
The reason you are reading this letter from me today is that I was bored 30 years ago.  I was bored and curious about the world and so I wound up spending a lot of time in the university computer lab, screwing around on Usenet and the early World Wide Web, looking for interesting things…

Building better cities

April 22, 2025
Clara Brenner, MBA ’12, arrived in Cambridge on the lookout for a business partner. She wanted to start her own ­company—and never have to deal with a boss again. She would go it alone if she had to, but she hoped to find someone whose skills would complement her own. It’s a common MBA tale.…

Inside-out learning

April 22, 2025
When the prison doors first closed behind him more than 50 years ago, Lee Perlman, PhD ’89, felt decidedly unsettled.   In his first job out of college, as a researcher for a consulting company working on a project for the US Federal Bureau of Prisons, he had been tasked with interviewing incarcerated participants in…

Unleashing the potential of qubits, one molecule at a time

April 22, 2025
It all began with a simple origami model.  As an undergrad at Harvard, Danna Freedman went to a professor’s office hours for her general chemistry class and came across an elegant paper model that depicted the fullerene molecule. The intricately folded representation of chemical bonds and atomic arrangements sparked her interest, igniting a profound curiosity…

The Institute’s greatest ambassadors

April 22, 2025
After decades of working as a biologist at a Southern school with a Division 1 football team, coming to MIT was a bit of a culture shock—in the best possible way. I’ve heard from MIT alumni all about late-night psetting, when to catch MITHenge, and the best way to celebrate Pi Day (with pie, of course).…

Bug-size robots that fly and flip could pollinate futuristic farms’ crops

April 22, 2025
Tiny flying robots could perform such useful tasks as pollinating crops inside multilevel warehouses, boosting yields while mitigating some of agriculture’s harmful impacts on the environment. The latest robo-bug from an MIT lab, inspired by the anatomy of the bee, comes closer to matching nature’s performance than ever before.  Led by Kevin Chen, an associate…

The future of AI processing

April 22, 2025
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is emerging in everyday use cases, thanks to advances in foundational models, more powerful chip technology, and abundant data. To become truly embedded and seamless, AI computation must now be distributed—and much of it will take place on device and at the edge.  To support this evolution, computation for running AI workloads…

The Download: canceled climate tech projects, and South Korea’s AI web comics

April 22, 2025
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. $8 billion of US climate tech projects have been canceled so far in 2025 This year has been rough for climate technology: Companies have canceled, downsized, or shut down at least 16 large-scale…

Generative AI is reshaping South Korea’s webcomics industry

April 22, 2025
“My mind is still sharp and my hands work just fine, so I have no interest in getting help from AI to draw or write stories,” says Lee Hyun-se, a legendary South Korean cartoonist best known for his seminal series A Daunting Team, a 1983 manhwa about the coming-of-age of heroic underdog baseball players. “Still,…