The humans behind the robots
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Here’s a question. Imagine that, for $15,000, you could purchase a robot to pitch in with all the mundane tasks in your household. The catch (aside from the price tag) is…
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The next generation of neural networks could live in hardware
Networks programmed directly into computer chip hardware can identify images faster, and use much less energy, than the traditional neural networks that underpin most modern AI systems. That’s according to work presented at a leading machine learning conference in Vancouver last week. Neural networks, from GPT-4 to Stable Diffusion, are built by wiring together perceptrons,…
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Accelerating AI innovation through application modernization
Business applications powered by AI are revolutionizing customer experiences, accelerating the speed of business, and driving employee productivity. In fact, according to research firm Frost & Sullivan’s 2024 Global State of AI report, 89% of organizations believe AI and machine learning will help them grow revenue, boost operational efficiency, and improve customer experience. Take for…
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This is where the data to build AI comes from
AI is all about data. Reams and reams of data are needed to train algorithms to do what we want, and what goes into the AI models determines what comes out. But here’s the problem: AI developers and researchers don’t really know much about the sources of the data they are using. AI’s data collection…
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AI is changing how we study bird migration
A small songbird soars above Ithaca, New York, on a September night. He is one of 4 billion birds, a great annual river of feathered migration across North America. Midair, he lets out what ornithologists call a nocturnal flight call to communicate with his flock. It’s the briefest of signals, barely 50 milliseconds long, emitted…
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AI’s search for more energy is growing more urgent
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. If you drove by one of the 2,990 data centers in the United States, you’d probably think little more than “Huh, that’s a boring-looking building.” You might not even notice it…
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AI’s emissions are about to skyrocket even further
It’s no secret that the current AI boom is using up immense amounts of energy. Now we have a better idea of how much. A new paper, from a team at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, examined 2,132 data centers operating in the United States (78% of all facilities in the country)….
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Google’s new Project Astra could be generative AI’s killer app
Google DeepMind has announced an impressive grab bag of new products and prototypes that may just let it seize back its lead in the race to turn generative artificial intelligence into a mass-market concern. Top billing goes to Gemini 2.0—the latest iteration of Google DeepMind’s family of multimodal large language models, now redesigned around the…
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Bluesky has an impersonator problem
Like many others, I recently fled social media platform X for Bluesky. In the process, I started following many of the people I followed on X. On Thanksgiving, I was delighted to see a private message from a fellow AI reporter, Will Knight from Wired. Or at least that’s who I thought I was talking…
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AI’s hype and antitrust problem is coming under scrutiny
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. The AI sector is plagued by a lack of competition and a lot of deceit—or at least that’s one way to interpret the latest flurry of actions taken in Washington. Last…
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