by 
Hello from Cambridge, Massachusetts!
I’m writing this outside of the main hall of MIT’s Media Lab, where I’ve been all week for a private Consortium Lab Member event, and boy is my brain on fire with ideas to share. Let’s start with what we’re covering this week on The Brief: Big Tech continues to ignore all user sentiment studies, Microsoft tries to own the phrase “vibe working,” and Instagram copies BeReal with new app.
Our stories have big tech and AI weaved throughout them, and so did many of the keynotes, panels and conversations I had at MIT. The major difference? The pure optimism from academia! It’s always a breath of fresh air to hear the brightest minds with grandiose ambitions discuss innovation…all divorced from capitalism. There were even senior leaders from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google on the stage at the same time, and a fist fight didn’t break out (note: it wasn’t Sam Altman & Dario Amodei, that might have come to fisticuffs).
There are literally hundreds of highlights I could share, so I’ll give a top few. Professor Deblina Sarkar showcased nanoelectronic devices (a billion times smaller than a rice grain) that can be injected into the body, cross the blood-brain barrier, and autonomously target a specific brain region for the treatment of Parkinson’s or Brain Cancer, with no surgery needed. Professor Patties Maes built a watch that listens and performs real-time fact-checking, alerting the user with a buzz if something untrue is said. I personally am going to start working with researcher Eitan Wolf to help him build a feature into smart glasses like the Meta Ray-Bans that creates sonic representations of the real-time visuals the glasses are seeing…a theme-song for the world around you! These and the hundreds of other innovations discussed at MIT are all in service of a better, brighter future for all of us…one that is deeply human, hopeful and connected to each other and the world around us.
In sum, I haven’t paid a lick of attention to Elon Musk fighting Sam Altman in court, Amazon’s earnings report, or politics this week, and it was the intellectual respite I needed. I hope you find the same pocket of inspiration this week as well.