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IDE Publications

At the IDE, research and data-based evidence underlie all that we do. Explore the IDE’s publications archives, including cutting-edge academic papers, featured in leading publications around the globe.

 

Publication Types

Working Papers Is there “Secret Sauce” in Large Language Model Development?

May 2026

Neil Thompson | Research Scientist, MIT Sloan School of Management and CSAIL

Matthias Mertens | Research Scientist at Future Tech

Natalia Fischl-Lanzoni

 

Do leading LLM developers possess a proprietary “secret sauce,” or is LLM performance driven by scaling up compute? Using training and benchmark data for 809 models released between 2022 and 2025, the authors estimate scaling-law regressions with release-date and developer fixed effects.

Research Papers The AI risk repository: A meta-review, database, and taxonomy of risks from artificial intelligence

Peter Slattery | Research Scientist at MIT Future Tech

Neil Thompson | Research Scientist, MIT Sloan School of Management and CSAIL

 

Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping society, from video generation to medical diagnosis, coding agents to autonomous vehicles. Yet researchers, policymakers, and technology companies lack shared terminology for discussing AI risks. This paper addresses this challenge by creating a comprehensive catalog of AI risks. 

Research Papers Teaching AI to handle exceptions: Supervised fine-tuning with human-aligned judgment

May 2026

Sinan Aral | Director, MIT IDE; Professor, MIT Sloan School of Management

Harang Ju | Assistant Professor, Johns Hopkins University

These findings highlight the need to address LLMs’ shortcomings in handling exceptions in order to guide the development of agentic AI toward models that can effectively align with human judgment and simultaneously adapt to novel contexts.

Working Papers Crashing Waves vs. Rising Tides: Preliminary Findings on AI Automation from Thousands of Worker Evaluations of Labor Market Tasks

Apr 2026

Neil Thompson | Research Scientist, MIT Sloan School of Management and CSAIL

Martin Fleming | Research Scientist, IDE

Matthias Mertens | Research Scientist at Future Tech

Brittany Harris | Data Analyst, CSAIL

Wensu Li | Postdoctoral Associate

Adam Kuzee

Harry Lyu

Jonathan Rosenfeld

Meiri Anto

 

The authors propose that AI automation is a continuum between: crashing waves where AI capabilities surge abruptly over small sets of tasks, and rising tides where the increase in AI capabilities is more continuous and broad-based.