June 13, 2025

Powering next-gen services with AI in regulated industries 

Businesses in highly-regulated industries like financial services, insurance, pharmaceuticals, and health care are increasingly turning to AI-powered tools to streamline complex and sensitive tasks. Conversational AI-driven interfaces are helping hospitals to track the location and delivery of a patient’s time-sensitive cancer drugs. Generative AI chatbots are helping insurance customers answer questions and solve problems. And agentic…

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…

OpenAI exec says the company would buy Google’s Chrome browser if offered the chance

April 22, 2025
An OpenAI exec said during Google’s antitrust trial this week that OpenAI would be interested in buying Google’s Chrome browser, were it made available for sale. The executive, ChatGPT chief Nick Turley, said in a court hearing Tuesday that acquiring Chrome would allow OpenAI to “offer a really incredible experience” and “introduce users into what […]

Tesla profits drop 71% on weak sales and anti-Elon Musk sentiment

April 22, 2025
Tesla’s flailing sales figures have put the company closer to the red than it has been in years, according to financial results released Tuesday, threatening one of its biggest advantages over other EV players. The electric automaker reported $409 million in net income on $19.3 billion in revenue after delivering almost 337,000 EVs in the […]

A Chinese AI video startup appears to be blocking politically sensitive images

April 22, 2025
A China-based startup, Sand AI, has released an openly licensed video-generating AI model that’s garnered praise from entrepreneurs like Microsoft Research Asia founding director Kai-Fu Lee. But Sand AI appears to be censoring images that might raise the ire of Chinese regulators from the hosted version of the model, according to TechCrunch’s testing. Earlier this […]