How optimistic are you about AI’s future?
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 start of a new year, and maybe especially this one, feels like a good time for a gut check: How optimistic are you feeling about the future of technology? Our…
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AI means the end of internet search as we’ve known it
We all know what it means, colloquially, to google something. You pop a few relevant words in a search box and in return get a list of blue links to the most relevant results. Maybe some quick explanations up top. Maybe some maps or sports scores or a video. But fundamentally, it’s just fetching information…
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Small language models: 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2025
WHO Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI WHEN Now Make no mistake: Size matters in the AI world. When OpenAI launched GPT-3 back in 2020, it was the largest language model ever built. The firm showed that supersizing this type of model was enough to send performance through the roof. That…
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Generative AI search: 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2025
WHO Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Perplexity WHEN Now Google’s introduction of AI Overviews, powered by its Gemini language model, will alter how billions of people search the internet. And generative search may be the first step toward an AI agent that handles any question you have or task you need done. Rather than returning…
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Fast-learning robots: 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2025
WHO Agility, Amazon, Covariant, Robust, Toyota Research Institute WHEN Now Generative AI is causing a paradigm shift in how robots are trained. It’s now clear how we might finally build the sort of truly capable robots that have for decades remained the stuff of science fiction. Robotics researchers are no strangers to artificial intelligence—it has…
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Robotaxis: 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2025
WHO Baidu, Pony AI, Waymo, Wayve, Zoox WHEN Now If you live in certain cities in America or China, you’ve probably spotted driverless cars dropping off passengers. Perhaps you’ve even ridden in one yourself. That’s a radical change from even three years ago, when these services were still learning the rules of the road. And…
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The biggest AI flops of 2024
The past 12 months have been undeniably busy for those working in AI. There have been more successful product launches than we can count, and even Nobel Prizes. But it hasn’t always been smooth sailing. AI is an unpredictable technology, and the increasing availability of generative models has led people to test their limits in…
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The AI Hype Index: Robot pets, simulated humans, and Apple’s AI text summaries
Separating AI reality from hyped-up fiction isn’t always easy. That’s why we’ve created the AI Hype Index—a simple, at-a-glance summary of everything you need to know about the state of the industry. More than 70 countries went to the polls in 2024. The good news is that this year of global elections turned out to…
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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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