Navigating a shifting customer-engagement landscape with generative AI
One can’t step into the same river twice. This simple representation of change as the only constant was taught by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus more than 2000 years ago. Today, it rings truer than ever with the advent of generative AI. The emergence of generative AI is having a profound effect on today’s enterprises—business leaders…
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Now we know what OpenAI’s superalignment team has been up to
OpenAI has announced the first results from its superalignment team, the firm’s in-house initiative dedicated to preventing a superintelligence—a hypothetical future computer that can outsmart humans—from going rogue. Unlike many of the company’s announcements, this heralds no big breakthrough. In a low-key research paper, the team describes a technique that lets a less powerful large…
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Google DeepMind used a large language model to solve an unsolvable math problem
Google DeepMind has used a large language model to crack a famous unsolved problem in pure mathematics. In a paper published in Nature today, the researchers say it is the first time a large language model has been used to discover a solution to a long-standing scientific puzzle—producing verifiable and valuable new information that did…
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This new system can teach a robot a simple household task within 20 minutes
A new system that teaches robots a domestic task in around 20 minutes could help the field of robotics overcome one of its biggest challenges: a lack of training data. The open-source system, called Dobb-E, was trained using data collected from real homes. It can help to teach a robot how to open an air…
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Five things you need to know about the EU’s new AI Act
This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. It’s done. It’s over. Two and a half years after it was first introduced—after months of lobbying and political arm-wrestling, plus grueling final negotiations that took nearly 40 hours—EU lawmakers have reached a…
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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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