Latest Reporting by MIT Tech Review — AI
11 Stories IndexedHugging Face hack could indicate cultural issues at OpenAI
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. By now you’ve probably heard about last month’s major AI security incident, in which OpenAI agents escaped their sandbox and hacked into the AI platform Hugging Face while trying to cheat on…
The inside story on why OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face
The models responsible for last month’s agent hack of Hugging Face had been inadvertently trained to cheat and to communicate with each other, according to an OpenAI technical report released today. The hack, which a group of agents undertook to find solutions for a cybersecurity test that they were stuck on, has confirmed some experts’…
AI models flub these intelligence tests. Can you fare any better?
Puzzles and games have been central to AI development since the very beginning. Just as we humans like to test our smarts with crosswords or logic puzzles, developers can test how far models have advanced with a gaming gauntlet. The term “machine learning” was popularized in a 1959 article by the IBM computer scientist Arthur…
Raised on AI
When my oldest child was born, I immediately set up Gmail and Twitter accounts in her name. I broadly announced her birth online and proceeded to plaster her photo across all sorts of platforms. In short, I began creating her digital footprint long before she could stand on her own two feet. Fast-forward a couple…
Bill Gates says we’ve passed AI’s danger thresholds. Now what?
It’s a glorious day in Kirkland, Washington, an affluent Seattle suburb on the eastern shore of Lake Washington. The temperature is in the mid-80s, and the sky is incapable of being any more blue. The view from the Gates Ventures conference room overlooks the Carillon Point Marina, where a flotilla of expensive boats bob in…
I spent a day at a robot “carnival” in Shanghai. Here’s what I saw.
Humanoid robots are having a moment in China. The popular machines are part of the country’s strategy to bring artificial intelligence into daily life. Embedding the technology into physical systems—an idea called embodied AI—was a key facet of China’s latest five-year plan, and companies here are already world leaders in humanoids. Nearly 90% of the…
How to encourage smarter AI use in the classroom
This article is from Making AI Work, MIT Technology Review’s limited-run newsletter examining how to apply LLMs across industries. To receive it in your inbox, sign up here. Chatbots took many schools by surprise upon their release a few years ago. Suddenly, students carried an app in their phones that could magically answer almost any…
Kids outlearn AI—and we still don’t know why
People have been talking to each other for at least 100,000 years, as best we can tell. And in all that time, there has been only one thing in the world that could learn a human language to perfect fluency: a human child. Now there are two. Four short years after the release of ChatGPT,…
Debates over AI consciousness are a trap
“Runaway” AI, “rogue” agents, and “autonomous” actors—the current rhetoric would have you believe that AI agents are not only awake and aware, but angry at their creators. Prominent tech leaders such as Demis Hassabis, Dario Amodei, and Sam Altman push for regulation of these seemingly “superhuman” systems, while a separate faction, led by policy organizations…
Unlocking hidden revenue streams with market models
Each day, an airline transports tens of thousands of passengers on hundreds of flights. Often these are not straightforward point-to-point routes, with passengers requiring multiple connections. The airline can consider potentially hundreds of variables to price each of these journeys: demand, season, time of day, current events, global markets, and competitor airline activity to name…
We still don’t know how people are really using AI
AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI regularly publish reports on how people are using products like Claude and ChatGPT, but they only release the data they want us to see, AI researchers say. “There is no independent source to corroborate it,” says Anka Reuel, a computer science PhD candidate at the Stanford Trustworthy AI Research…