AI’s energy impact is still small—but how we handle it is huge
With seemingly no limit to the demand for artificial intelligence, everyone in the energy, AI, and climate fields is justifiably worried. Will there be enough clean electricity to power AI and enough water to cool the data centers that support this technology? These are important questions with serious implications for communities, the economy, and the…
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AI can do a better job of persuading people than we do
Millions of people argue with each other online every day, but remarkably few of them change someone’s mind. New research suggests that large language models (LLMs) might do a better job. The finding suggests that AI could become a powerful tool for persuading people, for better or worse. A multi-university team of researchers found that…
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The real impact of AI on your organization
AI technologies are reshaping work, but not all workflows or roles will be equally transformed. Discover how AI is changing the way we work, given the technical capabilities and limitations of today’s systems. Through real-world use cases and strategic insights, this session equips business leaders with the knowledge to prioritize investments and identify the technologies…
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Inside the story that enraged OpenAI
In 2019, Karen Hao, a senior reporter with MIT Technology Review, pitched me on writing a story about a then little-known company, OpenAI. It was her biggest assignment to date. Hao’s feat of reporting took a series of twists and turns over the coming months, eventually revealing how OpenAI’s ambition had taken it far afield…
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Google DeepMind’s new AI agent uses large language models to crack real-world problems
Google DeepMind has once again used large language models to discover new solutions to long-standing problems in math and computer science. This time the firm has shown that its approach can not only tackle unsolved theoretical puzzles, but improve a range of important real-world processes as well. Google DeepMind’s new tool, called AlphaEvolve, uses the…
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Police tech can sidestep facial recognition bans now
Six months ago I attended the largest gathering of chiefs of police in the US to see how they’re using AI. I found some big developments, like officers getting AI to write their police reports. Today, I published a new story that shows just how far AI for police has developed since then. It’s about…
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How a new type of AI is helping police skirt facial recognition bans
Police and federal agencies have found a controversial new way to skirt the growing patchwork of laws that curb how they use facial recognition: an AI model that can track people using attributes like body size, gender, hair color and style, clothing, and accessories. The tool, called Track and built by the video analytics company…
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A new AI translation system for headphones clones multiple voices simultaneously
Imagine going for dinner with a group of friends who switch in and out of different languages you don’t speak, but still being able to understand what they’re saying. This scenario is the inspiration for a new AI headphone system that translates the speech of multiple speakers simultaneously, in real time. The system, called Spatial…
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How to build a better AI benchmark
It’s not easy being one of Silicon Valley’s favorite benchmarks. SWE-Bench (pronounced “swee bench”) launched in November 2024 to evaluate an AI model’s coding skill, using more than 2,000 real-world programming problems pulled from the public GitHub repositories of 12 different Python-based projects. In the months since then, it’s quickly become one of the most…
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This patient’s Neuralink brain implant gets a boost from generative AI
Last November, Bradford G. Smith got a brain implant from Elon Musk’s company Neuralink. The device, a set of thin wires attached to a computer about the thickness of a few quarters that sits in his skull, lets him use his thoughts to move a computer pointer on a screen. And by last week he…
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