AI Flash News

Mariano Salcedo ’25, a master’s student in the new Music Technology and Computation Graduate Program, is designing an AI to visualize and express music and other sounds.

An AI model generates novel proteins based on how they vibrate and move, opening new possibilities for dynamic biomaterials and adaptive therapeutics.

This new approach adapts to decide which robots should get the right of way at every moment, avoiding congestion and increasing throughput.

MIT Sea Grant works with the Woodwell Climate Research Center and other collaborators to demonstrate a deep learning-based system for fish monitoring.

By moving their hands and fingers, users can direct a robot to play piano or shoot a basketball, or they can manipulate objects in a virtual environment.

A new tomato-picking robot is learning to think before it acts. Instead of simply identifying ripe fruit, it predicts how easy each tomato will be to harvest and adjusts its approach accordingly. This smarter strategy boosted success rates to 81%, with the robot even switching angles when needed. The breakthrough could pave the way for farms where robots and humans work side by side.

Artificial intelligence is often portrayed as a tool that replaces human work, but new research from Swansea University suggests a far more exciting role: creative collaborator. In a large study with more than 800 participants designing virtual cars, researchers found that AI-generated design galleries sparked deeper engagement, longer exploration, and better results.

As AI systems began acing traditional tests, researchers realized those benchmarks were no longer tough enough. In response, nearly 1,000 experts created Humanity’s Last Exam, a massive 2,500-question challenge covering highly specialized topics across many fields. The exam was engineered so that any question solvable by current AI models was removed. Early results show even the most advanced systems still struggle — revealing a surprisingly large gap between AI performance and true expert-level knowledge.

As millions turn to ChatGPT and other AI chatbots for therapy-style advice, new research from Brown University raises a serious red flag: even when instructed to act like trained therapists, these systems routinely break core ethical standards of mental health care. In side-by-side evaluations with peer counselors and licensed psychologists, researchers uncovered 15 distinct ethical risks — from mishandling crisis situations and reinforcing harmful beliefs to showing biased responses and offering “deceptive empathy” that mimics care without real understanding.