Police tech can sidestep facial recognition bans now
Six months ago I attended the largest gathering of chiefs of police in the US to see how they’re using AI. I found some big developments, like officers getting AI to write their police reports. Today, I published a new story that shows just how far AI for police has developed since then. It’s about…
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How a new type of AI is helping police skirt facial recognition bans
Police and federal agencies have found a controversial new way to skirt the growing patchwork of laws that curb how they use facial recognition: an AI model that can track people using attributes like body size, gender, hair color and style, clothing, and accessories. The tool, called Track and built by the video analytics company…
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A new AI translation system for headphones clones multiple voices simultaneously
Imagine going for dinner with a group of friends who switch in and out of different languages you don’t speak, but still being able to understand what they’re saying. This scenario is the inspiration for a new AI headphone system that translates the speech of multiple speakers simultaneously, in real time. The system, called Spatial…
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How to build a better AI benchmark
It’s not easy being one of Silicon Valley’s favorite benchmarks. SWE-Bench (pronounced “swee bench”) launched in November 2024 to evaluate an AI model’s coding skill, using more than 2,000 real-world programming problems pulled from the public GitHub repositories of 12 different Python-based projects. In the months since then, it’s quickly become one of the most…
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This patient’s Neuralink brain implant gets a boost from generative AI
Last November, Bradford G. Smith got a brain implant from Elon Musk’s company Neuralink. The device, a set of thin wires attached to a computer about the thickness of a few quarters that sits in his skull, lets him use his thoughts to move a computer pointer on a screen. And by last week he…
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Why the humanoid workforce is running late
On Thursday I watched Daniela Rus, one of the world’s top experts on AI-powered robots, address a packed room at a Boston robotics expo. Rus spent a portion of her talk busting the notion that giant fleets of humanoids are already making themselves useful in manufacturing and warehouses around the world. That might come as…
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This data set helps researchers spot harmful stereotypes in LLMs
AI models are riddled with culturally specific biases. A new data set, called SHADES, is designed to help developers combat the problem by spotting harmful stereotypes and other kinds of discrimination that emerge in AI chatbot responses across a wide range of languages. Margaret Mitchell, chief ethics scientist at AI startup Hugging Face, led the…
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The AI Hype Index: AI agent cyberattacks, racing robots, and musical models
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. AI agents are the AI industry’s hypiest new product—intelligent assistants capable of completing tasks without human supervision. But while they can be theoretically…
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Is AI “normal”?
Right now, despite its ubiquity, AI is seen as anything but a normal technology. There is talk of AI systems that will soon merit the term “superintelligence,” and the former CEO of Google recently suggested we control AI models the way we control uranium and other nuclear weapons materials. Anthropic is dedicating time and money…
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Seeing AI as a collaborator, not a creator
The reason you are reading this letter from me today is that I was bored 30 years ago. I was bored and curious about the world and so I wound up spending a lot of time in the university computer lab, screwing around on Usenet and the early World Wide Web, looking for interesting things…
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