Research & Development news

• How to encourage smarter AI use in the classroom

  24-08-2026 16:20 via technologyreview.com
  
  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 homework question or spin up an essay in seconds. Of course, teachers can often tell when a student is using AI—models make mistakes that most humans d
  
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• The Download: kids outlearning AI, and space travel agents

  24-08-2026 14:10 via technologyreview.com
  
  This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.Kids outlearn AI—and we still don’t know whyTeaching a computer to use human language requires an inhuman amount of data. An LLM can easily churn through a hundred thousand times more words than a person will experience in the process of mastering their mother tongue.This yawning divide between children and machines is called the data ef
  
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• Kids outlearn AI—and we still don’t know why

  24-08-2026 11:00 via technologyreview.com
  
  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, many of us now take it for granted that we can converse naturally with our phones or computers. LLMs like Claude, DeepSeek, and OpenAI’s GPT models are fluent and flexible enough to masquerade con
  
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