The Download: rebuilding economic security, and solving math problems
—Edlyn V. Levine is CEO and co-founder of a stealth-mode technology start up and an affiliate at MIT Sloan School of Management and the Department of Physics at Harvard University.
Fiona Murray is the William Porter (1967) Professor of Entrepreneurship at the MIT School of Management and Vice Chair of the NATO Innovation Fund.
A country’s economic security—its ability to generate both national security and economic prosperity—is grounded in it having technological capabilities that outpace those of its adversaries and complement those of its allies.
Though this is a principle well known throughout history, the move over the last few decades toward globalization and offshoring has made ensuring a nation state’s security and economic prosperity increasingly problematic.
For the US and its allies in NATO, a particular problem has emerged: a “missing middle” in technology investment. Insufficient capital is allocated toward the maturation of breakthroughs in critical technologies to ensure that they can be deployed at scale. Here’s what we need to do to fix it.
How machines that can solve complex math problems might usher in more powerful AI
Last Thursday, Google DeepMind announced it had built AI systems that worked together to successfully solve four out of six problems from this year’s International Mathematical Olympiad, a prestigious competition for high school students.
It’s the first time any AI system has ever achieved such a high success rate on these kinds of math problems.
But this breakthrough is not just about math. In fact, it signals an exciting new development in the kind of AI we can now build. Read the full story.
—Melissa Heikkilä
