Agents are the talk of the AI industry—they’re capable of planning, reasoning, and executing complex tasks like scheduling meetings, ordering groceries, or even taking over your computer to change settings on your behalf. But the same sophisticated abilities that make agents helpful assistants could also make them powerful tools for [...]

Due to the inherent ambiguity in medical images like X-rays, radiologists often use words like “may” or “likely” when describing the presence of a certain pathology, such as pneumonia.But do the words radiologists use to express their confidence level accurately reflect how often a particular pathology occurs in patients? A [...]

Renewable power sources have seen unprecedented levels of investment in recent years. But with political uncertainty clouding the future of subsidies for green energy, these technologies must begin to compete with fossil fuels on equal footing, said participants at the 2025 MIT Energy Conference.“What these technologies need less is training [...]

In February 2024, Reddit struck a $60 million deal with Google to let the search giant use data on the platform to train its artificial intelligence models. Notably absent from the discussions were Reddit users, whose data were being sold.The deal reflected the reality of the modern internet: Big tech [...]

Imagine a coffee company trying to optimize its supply chain. The company sources beans from three suppliers, roasts them at two facilities into either dark or light coffee, and then ships the roasted coffee to three retail locations. The suppliers have different fixed capacity, and roasting costs and shipping costs [...]

On March 27, the results of the first clinical trial for a generative AI therapy bot were published, and they showed that people in the trial who had depression or anxiety or were at risk for eating disorders benefited from chatting with the bot.  I was surprised by those results, which [...]

The first clinical trial of a therapy bot that uses generative AI suggests it was as effective as human therapy for participants with depression, anxiety, or risk for developing eating disorders. Even so, it doesn’t give a go-ahead to the dozens of companies hyping such technologies while operating in a [...]

Imagine navigating a virtual reality with contact lenses or operating your smartphone under water: This and more could soon be a reality thanks to innovative e-skins. A research team has developed an electronic skin that detects and precisely tracks magnetic fields with a single global sensor. This artificial skin is [...]

The AI firm Anthropic has developed a way to peer inside a large language model and watch what it does as it comes up with a response, revealing key new insights into how the technology works. The takeaway: LLMs are even stranger than we thought. The Anthropic team was surprised by [...]

A new study shows that people in Japan treat robots and AI agents more respectfully than people in Western societies. [...]

This a robot can walk, without electronics, and only with the addition of a cartridge of compressed gas, right off the 3D-printer. It can also be printed in one go, from one material. [...]

A leaping robot could have application in search and rescue, construction, even forest monitoring. But how do you design a robot to stick a landing on a branch or pipe? Biologists worked with robot designers to discover how squirrels do it, and used what they learned to design a one-legged [...]