What the departing White House chief tech advisor has to say on AI
President Biden’s administration will end within two months, and likely to depart with him is Arati Prabhakar, the top mind for science and technology in his cabinet. She has served as Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy since 2022 and was the first to demonstrate ChatGPT to the president in…
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These AI Minecraft characters did weirdly human stuff all on their own
Left to their own devices, an army of AI characters didn’t just survive — they thrived. They developed in-game jobs, shared memes, voted on tax reforms and even spread a religion. The experiment played out on the open-world gaming platform Minecraft, where up to 1000 software agents at a time used large language models (LLMs)…
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We need to start wrestling with the ethics of AI agents
Generative AI models have become remarkably good at conversing with us, and creating images, videos, and music for us, but they’re not all that good at doing things for us. AI agents promise to change that. Think of them as AI models with a script and a purpose. They tend to come in one of…
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The way we measure progress in AI is terrible
Every time a new AI model is released, it’s typically touted as acing its performance against a series of benchmarks. OpenAI’s GPT-4o, for example, was launched in May with a compilation of results that showed its performance topping every other AI company’s latest model in several tests. The problem is that these benchmarks are poorly…
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How OpenAI stress-tests its large language models
OpenAI is once again lifting the lid (just a crack) on its safety-testing processes. Last month the company shared the results of an investigation that looked at how often ChatGPT produced a harmful gender or racial stereotype based on a user’s name. Now it has put out two papers describing how it stress-tests its powerful…
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Four ways to protect your art from AI
MIT Technology Review’s How To series helps you get things done. Since the start of the generative AI boom, artists have been worried about losing their livelihoods to AI tools. There have been plenty of examples of companies’ replacing human labor with computer programs. Most recently, Coca-Cola sparked controversy by creating a new Christmas ad…
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AI can now create a replica of your personality
Imagine sitting down with an AI model for a spoken two-hour interview. A friendly voice guides you through a conversation that ranges from your childhood, your formative memories, and your career to your thoughts on immigration policy. Not long after, a virtual replica of you is able to embody your values and preferences with stunning…
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How the largest gathering of US police chiefs is talking about AI
This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get it in your inbox first, sign up here. It can be tricky for reporters to get past certain doors, and the door to the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference is one that’s almost perpetually shut to the media. Thus, I was…
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How this grassroots effort could make AI voices more diverse
We are on the cusp of a voice AI boom, with tech companies such as Apple and OpenAI rolling out the next generation of artificial-intelligence-powered assistants. But the default voices for these assistants are often white American—British, if you’re lucky—and most definitely speak English. They represent only a tiny proportion of the many dialects and…
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Google DeepMind has a new way to look inside an AI’s “mind”
AI has led to breakthroughs in drug discovery and robotics and is in the process of entirely revolutionizing how we interact with machines and the web. The only problem is we don’t know exactly how it works, or why it works so well. We have a fair idea, but the details are too complex to…
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