Robots that learn as they fail could unlock a new era of AI
Lerrel Pinto is one of MIT Technology Review’s 2023 Innovators Under 35. Asked to explain his work, Lerrel Pinto, 31, likes to shoot back another question: When did you last see a cool robot in your home? The answer typically depends on whether the person asking owns a robot vacuum cleaner: yesterday or never. Pinto’s…
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There’s never been a more important time in AI policy
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Before we get started I wanted to flag two great talks this week. On Tuesday, September 12, at 12 p.m. US Eastern time, we will be hosting a subscriber-only roundtable conversation about how…
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Chinese AI chatbots want to be your emotional support
This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology developments in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. Chinese ChatGPT-like bots are having a moment right now. As I reported last week, Baidu became the first Chinese tech company to roll out its large language model—called Ernie Bot—to the…
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You need to talk to your kid about AI. Here are 6 things you should say.
In the past year, kids, teachers, and parents have had a crash course in artificial intelligence, thanks to the wildly popular AI chatbot ChatGPT. In a knee-jerk reaction, some schools, such as the New York City public schools, banned the technology—only to cancel the ban months later. Now that many adults have caught up with…
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We know remarkably little about how AI language models work
AI language models are not humans, and yet we evaluate them as if they were, using tests like the bar exam or the United States Medical Licensing Examination. The models tend to do really well in these exams, probably because examples of such exams are abundant in the models’ training data. Yet, as my colleague…
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Chinese ChatGPT-alternatives receive government approval for widespread public access
On Wednesday, Baidu, one of China’s leading artificial intelligence companies, announced it would open up access to its ChatGPT-like large language model, Ernie Bot, to the general public. It’s been a long time coming. Launched in mid-March, Ernie Bot was the first Chinese ChatGPT rival. Since then, many Chinese tech companies have followed suit and…
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Large language models aren’t people. Let’s stop testing them like they were.
When Taylor Webb played around with GPT-3 in early 2022, he was blown away by what OpenAI’s large language model appeared to be able to do. Here was a neural network trained only to predict the next word in a block of text—a jumped-up autocomplete. And yet it gave correct answers to many of the…
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Google DeepMind has launched a watermarking tool for AI-generated images
Google DeepMind has launched a new watermarking tool that labels whether images have been generated with AI. The tool, called SynthID, will initially be available only to users of Google’s AI image generator Imagen, which is hosted on Google Cloud’s machine learning platform Vertex. Users will be able to generate images using Imagen and then…
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Why we should all be rooting for boring AI
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 back from a wholesome week off picking blueberries in a forest. So this story we published last week about the messy ethics of AI in warfare is just the antidote, bringing my…
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Inside the messy ethics of making war with machines
In a near-future war—one that might begin tomorrow, for all we know—a soldier takes up a shooting position on an empty rooftop. His unit has been fighting through the city block by block. It feels as if enemies could be lying in silent wait behind every corner, ready to rain fire upon their marks the…
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