A tiny new open-source AI model performs as well as powerful big ones
The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Ai2), a research nonprofit, is releasing a family of open-source multimodal language models, called Molmo, that it says perform as well as top proprietary models from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. The organization claims that its biggest Molmo model, which has 72 billion parameters, outperforms OpenAI’s GPT-4o, which is estimated…
Read More
OpenAI released its advanced voice mode to more people. Here’s how to get it.
OpenAI is broadening access to Advanced Voice Mode, a feature of ChatGPT that allows you to speak more naturally with the AI model. It allows you to interrupt its responses mid-sentence, and can also sense and interpret your emotions based on your tone of voice and adjust its responses accordingly. These features were teased back…
Read More
An AI script editor could help decide what films get made in Hollywood
Every day across Hollywood, scores of film school graduates and production assistants work as script readers. Their job is to find the diamonds in the rough from the 50,000 or so screenplays pitched each year and flag any worth pursuing further. Each script runs anywhere from 100 to 150 pages, and it can take half…
Read More
What the US can learn from the role of AI in other elections
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. If it’s not broken, don’t fix it. That’s the approach bad state actors seem to have taken when it comes to how they mess with elections around the world. When the…
Read More
AI models let robots carry out tasks in unfamiliar environments
It’s tricky to get robots to do things in environments they’ve never seen before. Typically, researchers need to train them on new data for every new place they encounter, which can become very time-consuming and expensive. Now, researchers have developed a series of AI models that teach robots to complete basic tasks in new surroundings…
Read More
AI-generated content doesn’t seem to have swayed recent European elections
AI-generated falsehoods and deepfakes seem to have had no effect on election results in the UK, France, and the European Parliament this year, according to new research. Since the beginning of the generative-AI boom, there has been widespread fear that AI tools could boost bad actors’ ability to spread fake content with the potential to…
Read More
Why OpenAI’s new model is such a big deal
This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get it in your inbox first, sign up here. Welcome back to The Algorithm! This week we’re going to talk about OpenAI’s impressive new reasoning model, called o1. I want to illustrate why it’s such a big deal with an example from my wedding…
Read More
Why we need an AI safety hotline
In the past couple of years, regulators have been caught off guard again and again as tech companies compete to launch ever more advanced AI models. It’s only a matter of time before labs release another round of models that pose new regulatory challenges. We’re likely just weeks away, for example, from OpenAI’s release of…
Read More
Chatbots can persuade people to stop believing in conspiracy theories
The internet has made it easier than ever before to encounter and spread conspiracy theories. And while some are harmless, others can be deeply damaging, sowing discord and even leading to unnecessary deaths. Now, researchers believe they’ve uncovered a new tool for combating false conspiracy theories: AI chatbots. Researchers from MIT Sloan and Cornell University…
Read More
Google’s new tool lets large language models fact-check their responses
As long as chatbots have been around, they have made things up. Such “hallucinations” are an inherent part of how AI models work. However, they’re a big problem for companies betting big on AI, like Google, because they make the responses it generates unreliable. Google is releasing a tool today to address the issue. Called…
Read More
English