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Meta says AI-generated election content is not happening at a “systemic level”
May 23, 2024

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
May 22, 2024

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
May 21, 2024

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!
May 21, 2024

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
May 20, 2024

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
May 17, 2024

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.
May 15, 2024

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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Google’s Astra is its first AI-for-everything agent
May 14, 2024

Google’s Astra is its first AI-for-everything agent

Google is set to introduce a new system called Astra later this year and promises that it will be the most powerful, advanced type of AI assistant it’s ever launched.  The current generation of AI assistants, such as ChatGPT, can retrieve information and offer answers, but that is about it. But this year, Google is…

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What to expect at Google I/O
May 14, 2024

What to expect at Google I/O

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. In the world of AI, a lot can happen in a year. Last year, at the beginning of Big Tech’s AI wars, Google announced during its annual I/O conference that it…

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OpenAI’s new GPT-4o model lets people interact using voice or video in the same model
May 13, 2024

OpenAI’s new GPT-4o model lets people interact using voice or video in the same model

OpenAI just debuted GPT-4o, a new kind of AI model that you can communicate with in real time via live voice conversation, video streams from your phone, and text. The model is rolling out over the next few weeks and will be free for all users through both the GPT app and the web interface,…

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