Katie Rae, Engine CEO and managing partner, Smyon Dukach SM '92 and Brian Halligan MBA '05 have been named to the 2025 Boston Globe list of Tech Power Players in the venture capital sector, reports Aaron Pressman for The Boston Globe.
Sloan lecturer Mikey Shulman, Colin Angle '89, SM '90, Tye Brady SM '99, Laira Major SM '05, Dharmesh Shah SM '06 have been named to the 2025 Boston Globe Tech Power Players list for their work in the applied AI sector, reports Hiawatha Bray for The Boston Globe.
Boston Globe reporter Emily Spatz spotlights how a number of technologies – including the internet and the first widely used electronic navigation system – were developed by MIT researchers with the support of federal funding. The development of the internet has “MIT’s fingerprints all over it,” Prof. John Guttag emphasizes. Prof. David Mindell explains: “Federal funding for these ecosystems has been enormously important over a long time period.” Mindell adds that GPS alone probably “generated more economic value” over a 40-year period than the budgets of the government agencies that helped launch the navigational system.
Postdoc Isabella Loaiza speaks with ABC News reporter Max Zahn about her study examining how jobs and tasks across the U.S. economy shifted between 2016-2024. Loaiza and her colleagues found that “rather than dispense with qualities like critical thinking and empathy, workplace technology heightened the need for workers who exhibit those attributes,” Zahn explains. “It is true we’re seeing AI having an impact on white-collar work instead of more blue-collar work,” says Loaiza. “We found that jobs that are very human-intensive are probably more robust.”
Lecturer Michael Schrage speaks with Forbes reporter Josipa Majic Predin about the shift towards generative AI in business. "AI should not be seen overwhelmingly as just an ethical or a technical or a digital innovation and platform," says Schrage. "It's actually a philosophical capability and resource."
Researchers from MIT and other institutions have uncovered new pathways, along with identifying genes, that may contribute to the development of a new class of drugs to treat Alzheimer’s disease, reports John R. Ellement for The Boston Globe. “The drugs currently approved to treat Alzheimer’s have not been as successful as hoped,” Ellement explains. “Those drugs tend to target amyloid plaques in the brain, but the new research suggests other areas to target.”
Principal Research Scientist Kalyan Veeramachaneni speaks with WBUR On Point host Meghna Chakrabarti about the benefits and risks of training AI on synthetic data. “I think the AI that we have as of today and we are using is largely very small; I don't mean that as in size, but in the tasks that it can do,” says Veeramachaneni. “And as days go by, we are asking more and more of it… that requires us to provide more data, train more models that are much more efficient in reasoning, and can solve problems that we haven't thought of solving.”
Prof. Pattie Maes speaks with Financial Times reporter Cristina Criddle about recent developments aimed at increasing AI memory retention. “The more a system knows about you, the more it can be used for negative purposes to either make you buy stuff or convince you of particular beliefs,” says Maes. “So you have to start thinking about the underlying incentives of the companies that offer these services.”
Prof. Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL, speaks with Wall Street Journal reporter Isabelle Bousquette about her vision for the future of robots as soft, squishy, flexible and maybe even edible. Bousquette notes that Rus is a “pioneer” in the field of soft robotics and Steve Crowe, chair of the Robotics Summit and Expo, emphasizes: “there’s literally nobody in the world that knows more about this stuff than Daniela Rus.” “I really wanted to broaden our view of what a robot is,” says Rus. “If you have a mechanism that’s made out of paper and that moves, is that a robot or not? If you have an origami flower that you attach to a motor, is that a robot or not? To me, it’s a robot.”
Neha Narula, director of the MIT Digital Currency Initiative, joins Taylor Wilson of USA Today’s The Excerpt podcast to discuss the future of cash as the use of digital currencies expands. On her vision for the future of money, Narula says, “We’ve had a lot of promise, we’ve had a lot of exciting ideas, but now it’s time to really buckle down and really build products that help users and help make their lives better.”
Researchers at MIT have conducted a survey to understand how people interact with AI companions, reports David Adam for Nature. The researchers found that 12% [of users] were drawn to the apps to help them cope with loneliness and 14% used them to discuss personal issues and mental health,” writes Adam. “Forty-two per cent of users said they logged on a few times a week, with just 15% doing so every day. More than 90% reported that their sessions lasted less than one hour.”
Writing for Foreign Affairs, President Emeritus L. Rafael Reif makes the case that “on the battlefield of technology, Americans must both continue to do what they do best and find new ways to improve competitiveness.” Reif explores the United States’ rich history of creating foundational technologies, innovation that frequently stems from research universities. Reif emphasizes: “To avert scientific and technological stagnation, the United States must significantly increase public investments in university-based research, ensure that it capitalizes on discoveries that emerge from academia, and devise sensible immigration policies that allow the world’s best students to study and then work in the United States.”
Prof. Rafael Gómez-Bombarelli speaks with The Atlantic reporter Matteo Wong about the current state of artificial intelligence technologies and how the technology might be used in medical care going forward. “Scientists use the tools that are out there for information processing and summarization,” says Gómez-Bombarelli. “Everybody does that; that’s an established win.”
Forbes contributor Tracey Follows spotlights how MIT Media Lab researchers are exploring how AI can “support, rather than replace, human flourishing” as part of the Media Lab’s new Advancing Humans with AI (AHA) research program. “We are creating AI and AI in turn will shape us. We don’t want to make the same mistakes we made with social media,” says Prof. Patti Maes. “It is critical that we think of AI as not just a technical problem for engineers and entrepreneurs to solve, but also as a human design problem, requiring the expertise from human-computer interaction designers, psychologists, and social scientists for AI to lead to beneficial impact on the human experience.”
Forbes reporter Tracey Follows spotlights the MIT Media Lab’s Advancing Humans with AI (AHA) project, a “new research program asking how can we design AI to support human flourishing.” At the launch event, Prof. Sherry Turkle “raised a specific and timely concern: what is the human cost of talking to machines that only pretend to care?”