AI-directed drones could help find lost hikers faster
If a hiker gets lost in the rugged Scottish Highlands, rescue teams sometimes send up a drone to search for clues of the individual’s route—trampled vegetation, dropped clothing, food wrappers. But with vast terrain to cover and limited battery life, picking the right area to search is critical. Traditionally, expert drone pilots use a combination…
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AI-readiness for C-suite leaders
Generative AI, like predictive AI before it, has rightly seized the attention of business executives. The technology has the potential to add trillions of dollars to annual global economic activity, and its adoption for business applications is expected to improve the top or bottom lines—or both—at many organizations. While generative AI offers an impressive and…
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Noise-canceling headphones use AI to let a single voice through
Modern life is noisy. If you don’t like it, noise-canceling headphones can reduce the sounds in your environment. But they muffle sounds indiscriminately, so you can easily end up missing something you actually want to hear. A new prototype AI system for such headphones aims to solve this. Called Target Speech Hearing, the system gives…
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Meta says AI-generated election content is not happening at a “systemic level”
Meta has seen strikingly little AI-generated misinformation around the 2024 elections despite major votes in countries such as Indonesia, Taiwan, and Bangladesh, said the company’s president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, on Wednesday. “The interesting thing so far—I stress, so far—is not how much but how little AI-generated content [there is],” said Clegg during an…
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OpenAI’s latest blunder shows the challenges facing Chinese AI models
This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. Last week’s release of GPT-4o, a new AI “omnimodel” that you can interact with using voice, text, or video, was supposed to be a big moment for OpenAI. But just days later,…
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Five ways criminals are using AI
Artificial intelligence has brought a big boost in productivity—to the criminal underworld. Generative AI provides a new, powerful tool kit that allows malicious actors to work far more efficiently and internationally than ever before, says Vincenzo Ciancaglini, a senior threat researcher at the security company Trend Micro. Most criminals are “not living in some dark…
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Join me at EmTech Digital this week!
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. I’m excited to spend this week in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I’m visiting the mothership for MIT Technology Review’s annual flagship AI conference, EmTech Digital, on May 22-23. Between the world leaders gathering in Seoul…
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AI models can outperform humans in tests to identify mental states
Humans are complicated beings. The ways we communicate are multilayered, and psychologists have devised many kinds of tests to measure our ability to infer meaning and understanding from interactions with each other. AI models are getting better at these tests. New research published today in Nature Human Behavior found that some large language models (LLMs)…
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GPT-4o’s Chinese token-training data is polluted by spam and porn websites
Soon after OpenAI released GPT-4o on Monday, May 13, some Chinese speakers started to notice something seemed off about this newest version of the chatbot: the tokens it uses to parse text were full of spam and porn phrases. On May 14, Tianle Cai, a PhD student at Princeton University studying inference efficiency in large…
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OpenAI and Google are launching supercharged AI assistants. Here’s how you can try them out.
This week, Google and OpenAI both announced they’ve built supercharged AI assistants: tools that can converse with you in real time and recover when you interrupt them, analyze your surroundings via live video, and translate conversations on the fly. OpenAI struck first on Monday, when it debuted its new flagship model GPT-4o. The live demonstration…
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