Launching youth entrepreneurship

Even as a teenager, Laurie Stach ’06 says, she had a “crazy ambition to take on the world and solve problems.” At MIT, she realized she wasn’t the only one. Stach says that students form teams, identify a problem, and build an actual product or service that they then take to market—often generating preorders or even revenue before the four-week program ends. Raised in Texas and the Carolinas, Stach majored in mechanical engineering at MIT and earned her MBA from Harvard Business School in 2011.

She ran her first summer program on MIT’s campus with 30 students in 2013 and says “it kind of snowballed.” LaunchX now serves about 500 students per year across both in-person and online programs. Read more at www.technologyreview.com/alumni-profiles. It makes it easy to trick them into doing things they shouldn’t, such as telling you how to sabotage an aircraft’s navigation system.

A new technique has let the company probe deeper than ever into the weird workings of an LLM. Some donor-conceived people are finding hundreds of siblings. An international cap on donations could help prevent that.

AI doesn’t just learn stereotypes from its training. It can cook up new ones, too. Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.