Join me at EmTech Digital this week!
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. I’m excited to spend this week in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I’m visiting the mothership for MIT Technology Review’s annual flagship AI conference, EmTech Digital, on May 22-23. Between the world leaders gathering in Seoul…
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AI models can outperform humans in tests to identify mental states
Humans are complicated beings. The ways we communicate are multilayered, and psychologists have devised many kinds of tests to measure our ability to infer meaning and understanding from interactions with each other. AI models are getting better at these tests. New research published today in Nature Human Behavior found that some large language models (LLMs)…
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GPT-4o’s Chinese token-training data is polluted by spam and porn websites
Soon after OpenAI released GPT-4o on Monday, May 13, some Chinese speakers started to notice something seemed off about this newest version of the chatbot: the tokens it uses to parse text were full of spam and porn phrases. On May 14, Tianle Cai, a PhD student at Princeton University studying inference efficiency in large…
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OpenAI and Google are launching supercharged AI assistants. Here’s how you can try them out.
This week, Google and OpenAI both announced they’ve built supercharged AI assistants: tools that can converse with you in real time and recover when you interrupt them, analyze your surroundings via live video, and translate conversations on the fly. OpenAI struck first on Monday, when it debuted its new flagship model GPT-4o. The live demonstration…
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Google’s Astra is its first AI-for-everything agent
Google is set to introduce a new system called Astra later this year and promises that it will be the most powerful, advanced type of AI assistant it’s ever launched. The current generation of AI assistants, such as ChatGPT, can retrieve information and offer answers, but that is about it. But this year, Google is…
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What to expect at Google I/O
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. In the world of AI, a lot can happen in a year. Last year, at the beginning of Big Tech’s AI wars, Google announced during its annual I/O conference that it…
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OpenAI’s new GPT-4o model lets people interact using voice or video in the same model
OpenAI just debuted GPT-4o, a new kind of AI model that you can communicate with in real time via live voice conversation, video streams from your phone, and text. The model is rolling out over the next few weeks and will be free for all users through both the GPT app and the web interface,…
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AI systems are getting better at tricking us
A wave of AI systems have “deceived” humans in ways they haven’t been explicitly trained to do, by offering up untrue explanations for their behavior or concealing the truth from human users and misleading them to achieve a strategic end. This issue highlights how difficult artificial intelligence is to control and the unpredictable ways in…
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Tech workers should shine a light on the industry’s secretive work with the military
It’s a hell of a time to have a conscience if you work in tech. The ongoing Israeli assault on Gaza has brought the stakes of Silicon Valley’s military contracts into stark relief. Meanwhile, corporate leadership has embraced a no politics in the workplace policy enforced at the point of the knife. Workers are caught…
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Google DeepMind’s new AlphaFold can model a much larger slice of biological life
Google DeepMind has released an improved version of its biology prediction tool, AlphaFold, that can predict the structures not only of proteins but of nearly all the elements of biological life. It’s a development that could help accelerate drug discovery and other scientific research. The tool is currently being used to experiment with identifying everything…
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