The AI lab waging a guerrilla war over exploitative AI
Ben Zhao remembers well the moment he officially jumped into the fight between artists and generative AI: when one artist asked for AI bananas. A computer security researcher at the University of Chicago, Zhao had made a name for himself by building tools to protect images from facial recognition technology. It was this work that…
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Generative AI taught a robot dog to scramble around a new environment
Teaching robots to navigate new environments is tough. You can train them on physical, real-world data taken from recordings made by humans, but that’s scarce, and expensive to collect. Digital simulations are a rapid, scalable way to teach them to do new things, but the robots often fail when they’re pulled out of virtual worlds…
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Africa’s AI researchers are ready for takeoff
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. When we talk about the global race for AI dominance, the conversation often focuses on tensions between the US and China, and European efforts at regulating the technology. But it’s high…
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A bold AI movement is underway in Africa—but it is being held up
Kessel Okinga-Koumu paced around a crowded hallway. It was her first time presenting at the Deep Learning Indaba, she told the crowd gathered to hear her, filled with researchers from Africa’s machine-learning community. The annual weeklong conference (‘Indaba’ is a Zulu word for gathering), was held most recently in September at Amadou Mahtar Mbow University…
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How ChatGPT search paves the way for AI agents
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. OpenAI’s Olivier Godement, head of product for its platform, and Romain Huet, head of developer experience, are on a whistle-stop tour around the world. Last week, I sat down with the…
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This AI-generated Minecraft may represent the future of real-time video generation
When you walk around in a version of the video game Minecraft from the AI companies Decart and Etched, it feels a little off. Sure, you can move forward, cut down a tree, and lay down a dirt block, just like in the real thing. If you turn around, though, the dirt block you just…
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OpenAI brings a new web search tool to ChatGPT
ChatGPT can now search the web for up-to-date answers to a user’s queries, OpenAI announced today. Until now, ChatGPT was mostly restricted to generating answers from its training data, which is current up to October 2023 for GPT-4o, and had limited web search capabilities. Searches about generalized topics will still draw on this information from…
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Chasing AI’s value in life sciences
Inspired by an unprecedented opportunity, the life sciences sector has gone all in on AI. For example, in 2023, Pfizer introduced an internal generative AI platform expected to deliver $750 million to $1 billion in value. And Moderna partnered with OpenAI in April 2024, scaling its AI efforts to deploy ChatGPT Enterprise, embedding the tool’s…
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Cultivating the next generation of AI innovators in a global tech hub
A few years ago, I had to make one of the biggest decisions of my life: continue as a professor at the University of Melbourne or move to another part of the world to help build a brand new university focused entirely on artificial intelligence. With the rapid development we have seen in AI over…
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Palmer Luckey’s vision for the future of mixed reality
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. War is a catalyst for change, an expert in AI and warfare told me in 2022. At the time, the war in Ukraine had just started, and the military AI business was…
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