These robots know when to ask for help
There are two bowls on the kitchen table: one made of plastic, the other metal. You ask the robot to pick up the bowl and put it in the microwave. Which one will it choose? A human might ask for clarification, but given the vague command, the robot may place the metal bowl in the…
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Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Gemini and the coming age of AI
Google released the first phase of its next-generation AI model, Gemini, today. Gemini reflects years of efforts from inside Google, overseen and driven by its CEO, Sundar Pichai. (You can read all about Gemini in our report from Melissa Heikkilä and Will Douglas Heaven here.) Pichai, who previously oversaw Chrome and Android, is famously product…
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Google DeepMind’s new Gemini model looks amazing—but could signal peak AI hype
Hype about Gemini, Google DeepMind’s long-rumored response to OpenAI’s GPT-4, has been building for months. Today the company finally revealed what it has been working on in secret all this time. Was the hype justified? Yes—and no. Gemini is Google’s biggest AI launch yet, its push to take on competitors OpenAI and Microsoft in the…
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How AI assistants are already changing the way code gets made
Two weeks into the coding class he was teaching at Duke University in North Carolina this spring, Noah Gift told his students to throw out the course materials he’d given them. Instead of working with Python, one of the most popular entry-level programming languages, the students would now be using Rust, a language that was…
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AI’s carbon footprint is bigger than you think
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. World leaders are currently in Dubai for the UN COP28 climate talks. As 2023 is set to become the hottest year on record, this year’s meeting is a moment of reckoning for oil…
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Make no mistake—AI is owned by Big Tech
Until late November, when the epic saga of OpenAI’s board breakdown unfolded, the casual observer could be forgiven for assuming that the industry around generative AI was a vibrant competitive ecosystem. But this is not the case—nor has it ever been. And understanding why is fundamental to understanding what AI is, and what threats it…
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Making an image with generative AI uses as much energy as charging your phone
Each time you use AI to generate an image, write an email, or ask a chatbot a question, it comes at a cost to the planet. In fact, generating an image using a powerful AI model takes as much energy as fully charging your smartphone, according to a new study by researchers at the AI…
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Google DeepMind’s new AI tool helped create more than 700 new materials
From EV batteries to solar cells to microchips, new materials can supercharge technological breakthroughs. But discovering them usually takes months or even years of trial-and-error research. Google DeepMind hopes to change that with a new tool that uses deep learning to dramatically speed up the process of discovering new materials. Called graphical networks for material…
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Unpacking the hype around OpenAI’s rumored new Q* model
This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Ever since last week’s dramatic events at OpenAI, the rumor mill has been in overdrive about why the company’s chief scientific officer Ilya Sutskever and its board decided to oust CEO Sam…
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Finding value in generative AI for financial services
With tools such as ChatGPT, DALLE-2, and CodeStarter, generative AI has captured the public imagination in 2023. Unlike past technologies that have come and gone—think metaverse—this latest one looks set to stay. OpenAI’s chatbot, ChatGPT, is perhaps the best-known generative AI tool. It reached 100 million monthly active users in just two months after launch,…
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