
Google DeepMind’s AI systems can now solve complex math problems
AI models can easily generate essays and other types of text. However, they’re nowhere near as good at solving math problems, which tend to involve logical reasoning—something that’s beyond the capabilities of most current AI systems. But that may finally be changing. Google DeepMind says it has trained two specialized AI systems to solve complex…
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AI trained on AI garbage spits out AI garbage
AI models work by training on huge swaths of data from the internet. But as AI is increasingly being used to pump out web pages filled with junk content, that process is in danger of being undermined. New research published in Nature shows that the quality of the model’s output gradually degrades when AI trains…
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How to access Chinese LLM chatbots across the world
MIT Technology Review’s How To series helps you get things done. Hundreds of Chinese large language models have been released since the government started permitting AI companies to open up their models for the general public to play around with in the summer of 2023. For users in the West, finding these Chinese models and trying them…
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How’s AI self-regulation going?
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Yesterday, on July 21, President Joe Biden announced he is stepping down from the race against Donald Trump in the US presidential election. But AI nerds may remember that exactly a…
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AI companies promised the White House to self-regulate one year ago. What’s changed?
One year ago, on July 21, 2023, seven leading AI companies—Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI—committed with the White House to a set of eight voluntary commitments on how to develop AI in a safe and trustworthy way. These included promises to do things like improve the testing and transparency around AI systems,…
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A new weather prediction model from Google combines AI with traditional physics
Google DeepMind researchers have built a new weather prediction model that combines machine learning with more conventional techniques, potentially yielding accurate forecasts at a fraction of the current cost. The model, called NeuralGCN and described in a paper in Nature today, bridges a divide that’s grown among weather prediction experts in the last several years. …
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Building supply chain resilience with AI
If the last five years have taught businesses with complex supply chains anything, it is that resilience is crucial. In the first three months of the covid-19 pandemic, for example, supply-chain leader Amazon grew its business 44%. Its investments in supply chain resilience allowed it to deliver when its competitors could not, says Sanjeev Maddila,…
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A short history of AI, and what it is (and isn’t)
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. It’s the simplest questions that are often the hardest to answer. That applies to AI, too. Even though it’s a technology being sold as a solution to the world’s problems, nobody…
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AI can make you more creative—but it has limits
Generative AI models have made it simpler and quicker to produce everything from text passages and images to video clips and audio tracks. Texts and media that might have taken years for humans to create can now be generated in seconds. But while AI’s output can certainly seem creative, do these models actually boost human…
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Robot-packed meals are coming to the frozen-food aisle
Advances in artificial intelligence are coming to your freezer, in the form of robot-assembled prepared meals. Chef Robotics, a San Francisco–based startup, has launched a system of AI-powered robotic arms that can be quickly programmed with a recipe to dole out accurate portions of everything from tikka masala to pesto tortellini. After experiments with leading…
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