For Rupert Young ’95, SM ’95, his career in data science and cybersecurity began when his grandfather gifted him thousands of stamps: He built intricate databases to catalogue them, displaying the “precise eye” for detail and nuance that his MIT application essay said would make him a good engineer.

Young is now chief product officer of ­MaxMind, whose work with IP-address location data and fraud prevention has made it a go-to resource. Streaming companies, security vendors, merchants, and ad-network providers use its signature tool, GeoIP, to determine how and where users are accessing services. This information makes it possible to ensure retail sites are using the correct currency, flag suspicious bank logins, and more.

Young’s passion for engineering was shaped by internships, and he has paid it forward by volunteering at his children’s California high school and trying to keep up with what “the next generation of engineers are tinkering with.” The next generation of product innovation at MaxMind excites him too.

“Working with my team to try to find patterns in data and solve challenging problems—to me, there’s no greater joy,” he says.

Read more at www.technologyreview.com/alumni-profiles.

Many people find AI-based chatbots helpful in keeping up with news, but a study by Pattie Maes and her colleagues at the MIT Media Lab points to a big problem with this strategy. 

Participants who evaluated paired news headlines and images over the course of four weeks were initially 21% percent more accurate at telling fake news from real when aided by a chatbot—but by week four, they’d become 15% worse at identifying fake news without AI than they were before (though roughly a quarter of them reported feeling better at it). The result reflects an “AI dependency paradox” that has been observed in other domains, including medicine. 

“Users get excited about these ‘magical’ LLMs but forget that they’re just statistical models that predict the next ‘token’ in a sequence,” says Anku Rani, a PhD student in media arts and sciences and one of the lead authors of the study, along with fellow MAS PhD student Valdemar Danry, SM ’23. 

The researchers also found, however, that certain AI styles were associated with stronger independent performance later on, even if they slowed people down at first. “AIs that ‘tell’ by providing direct answers are more likely to foster reliance, while those that ‘ask’ via Socratic questioning are better at engaging someone to actually learn how to discern the truth on their own,” says Danry. “But it’s very much a trade-off between speed and effort.”