In part 2 of our two-part series on generative artificial intelligence’s environmental impacts, MIT News explores some of the ways experts are working to reduce the technology’s carbon footprint. The energy demands of generative AI are expected to continue increasing dramatically over the next decade. For instance, an April 2025 report from the International Energy Agency predicts…
Machine-learning models can speed up the discovery of new materials by making predictions and suggesting experiments. But most models today only consider a few specific types of data or variables. Compare that with human scientists, who work in a collaborative environment and consider experimental results, the broader scientific literature, imaging and structural analysis, personal experience…
Annotating regions of interest in medical images, a process known as segmentation, is often one of the first steps clinical researchers take when running a new study involving biomedical images. For instance, to determine how the size of the brain’s hippocampus changes as patients age, the scientist first outlines each hippocampus in a series of…
Whitney Zhang ’21 believes in the importance of valuing workers regardless of where they fit into an organizational chart. Zhang is a PhD student in MIT’s Department of Economics studying labor economics. She explores how the technological and managerial decisions companies make affect workers across the pay spectrum. “I’ve been interested in economics, economic impacts, and…
MIT Department of Mathematics researchers David Roe ’06 and Andrew Sutherland ’90, PhD ’07 are among the inaugural recipients of the Renaissance Philanthropy and XTX Markets’ AI for Math grants. Four additional MIT alumni — Anshula Gandhi ’19, Viktor Kunčak SM ’01, PhD ’07; Gireeja Ranade ’07; and Damiano Testa PhD ’05 — were also…
The artificial intelligence models that turn text into images are also useful for generating new materials. Over the last few years, generative materials models from companies like Google, Microsoft, and Meta have drawn on their training data to help researchers design tens of millions of new materials. But when it comes to designing materials with…
The Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship strives to teach students the craft of entrepreneurship. Over the last few years, no technology has changed that craft more than artificial intelligence. While many are predicting a rapid and complete transformation in how startups are built, the Trust Center’s leaders have a more nuanced view. “The fundamentals…
When OpenAI introduced ChatGPT to the world in 2022, it brought generative artificial intelligence into the mainstream and started a snowball effect that led to its rapid integration into industry, scientific research, health care, and the everyday lives of people who use the technology. What comes next for this powerful but imperfect tool? With that…
When researchers are building large language models (LLMs), they aim to maximize performance under a particular computational and financial budget. Since training a model can amount to millions of dollars, developers need to be judicious with cost-impacting decisions about, for instance, the model architecture, optimizers, and training datasets before committing to a model. To anticipate…
For pregnant women, ultrasounds are an informative (and sometimes necessary) procedure. They typically produce two-dimensional black-and-white scans of fetuses that can reveal key insights, including biological sex, approximate size, and abnormalities like heart issues or cleft lip. If your doctor wants a closer look, they may use magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), which uses magnetic fields…