More News from IWER

In an interview with Bloomberg Surveillance, professor of the practice Gary Gensler said that there are safety issues, pointing to when OpenAI models breached the technology firm Hugging Face earlier this year. He noted concerns around AI's capabilities and said that while it is possible to put up safeguards, competition with China presents a "big, consequential wrinkle."

Associate dean Christopher Knittel and co-author wrote: "A simple accounting check shows why our estimated magnitude isn't a stretch. In Massachusetts, fixed costs make up roughly 60 percent of total system costs, and about 13 percent of customers have rooftop solar and pay very little, if anything, toward those costs because net metering zeroes out their bills. When this happens, the fixed cost of running the grid doesn't shrink; it just gets divided over a base that's 13 percent smaller."

Institute Professor Daron Acemoglu wrote: "The problem is not that models are too advanced (I do not see any compelling evidence that models will escape human control if they are better trained and monitored). It is that frontier labs are training their models in ways that may be leading to a type of distorted intelligence. Ultimately, it is the race for artificial general intelligence, combined with faulty metrics and hasty choices on safety, that is creating distorted intelligence and increasingly dangerous AI models."

Senior lecturer Paul Cheek said the first step for Chief Human Resources Officers (CHROs) is investing in AI training and upskilling for executives and employees. The next is rethinking the org chart. "The CHRO title itself needs to change from managing headcount to auditing whether a given role needs a human's judgment or an AI agent's uptime," Cheek said.

A paper by associate dean Christopher Knittel and co-authors argued that the administration's calculations contained major inconsistencies, such as in its assumptions about how consumers value the benefits of saving fuel. "If you do the analysis right, we found that revoking these standards does not save consumers money," said Knittel.

Assistant professor Chara Podimata is collaborating with MIT professors Adam Berinsky and Charles Stewart III on a public experiment, the Election LLM Observatory: a dashboard where the responses of major models to questions about candidates and elections are published and can be examined by journalists, researchers, and ordinary users. "I feel like we haven't taken the right steps to educate people, to make them understand what these chatbots can and can't do," she said. "Technology is changing the world very drastically and very quickly. We have left people behind. We have given them the technology itself, fully accessible, without educating them on how to use it."

Professor Yasheng Huang argued that low wages are not merely an unfortunate by-product of China's development model; keeping labor costs down has been fundamental to its manufacturing success. He described China as an "absolute-advantage economy" competing with America at the high end, in AI, electric vehicles, and electronics, while simultaneously competing with much poorer countries in textiles and other labor-intensive goods.

Professor Jared Curhan and his colleagues studied the effect of introducing prolonged silences during negotiations. They found that pauses of at least three seconds could encourage a more deliberate way of thinking and help find solutions capable of generating value for both parties.

In a recent X post, Institute Professor Daron Acemoglu argued that the tax code favors spending on machinery and AI over hiring workers. He said there are three grounds on which he thinks a temporary wealth tax is justifiable. "It partially reverses the effects of more than two decades of tax avoidance by the very wealthy, it acts as a brake on their growing dominance over the political process, and it may pave the way for more comprehensive tax reform at the federal level."

"There tends to be a prevailing narrative that robots are coming for jobs," professor Roberto Rigobon said in a statement on research he conducted on AI. "We think it's important to ask different questions, looking more at human capabilities than AI capabilities and shifting toward what technology can give us rather than what it might take away."