- OpenAI has released a new image generator that’s designed less for typical surrealist AI art and more for highly controllable and practical creation of visuals—a sign that OpenAI thinks its tools are ready for use in fields like advertising and graphic design. The image generator, which is now part of the company’s GPT-4o model, was […]
- A few weeks ago, when I was at the digital rights conference RightsCon in Taiwan, I watched in real time as civil society organizations from around the world, including the US, grappled with the loss of one of the biggest funders of global digital rights work: the United States government. As I wrote in my […]
- AI agents have set the tech industry abuzz. Unlike chatbots, these groundbreaking new systems operate outside of a chat window, navigating multiple applications to execute complex tasks, like scheduling meetings or shopping online, in response to simple user commands. As agents are developed to become more capable, a crucial question emerges: How much control are […]
- OpenAI says over 400 million people use ChatGPT every week. But how does interacting with it affect us? Does it make us more or less lonely? These are some of the questions OpenAI set out to investigate, in partnership with the MIT Media Lab, in a pair of new studies. They found that only a […]
- In partnership with Google, the Computer History Museum has released the source code to AlexNet, the neural network that in 2012 kickstarted today’s prevailing approach to AI. The source code is available as open source on CHM’s GitHub page. What Is AlexNet? AlexNet is an artificial neural network created to recognize the contents of photographic […]
- The ability to generate high-quality images quickly is crucial for producing realistic simulated environments that can be used to train self-driving cars to avoid unpredictable hazards, making them safer on real streets.But the generative artificial intelligence techniques increasingly being used to produce such images have drawbacks. One popular type of model, called a diffusion model, […]
- As director of the MIT BioMicro Center (BMC), Stuart Levine ’97 wholeheartedly embraces the variety of challenges he tackles each day. One of over 50 core facilities providing shared resources across the Institute, the BMC supplies integrated high-throughput genomics, single-cell and spatial transcriptomic analysis, bioinformatics support, and data management to researchers across MIT. The BioMicro […]
- There has never been a more pressing time for food producers to harness technology to tackle the sector’s tough mission. To produce ever more healthy and appealing food for a growing global population in a way that is resilient and affordable, all while minimizing waste and reducing the sector’s environmental impact. From farm to factory, […]
- Ben Vinson III, president of Howard University, made a compelling call for artificial intelligence to be “developed with wisdom,” as he delivered MIT’s annual Karl Taylor Compton Lecture on campus Monday. The broad-ranging talk posed a series of searching questions about our human ideals and practices, and was anchored in the view that, as Vinson said, […]
- Self-driving cars were supposed to be in our garages by now, according to the optimistic predictions of just a few years ago. But we may be nearing a few tipping points, with robotaxi adoption going up and consumers getting accustomed to more and more sophisticated driver-assistance systems in their vehicles. One company that’s pushing things […]
- This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Last Wednesday, Google made a somewhat surprising announcement. It launched a version of its AI model, Gemini, that can do things not just in the digital realm of chatbots and internet search […]
- This story originally appeared in The Debrief with Mat Honan, a weekly newsletter about the biggest stories in tech from our editor in chief. Sign up here to get the next one in your inbox. I’ve been mulling over something that Will Heaven, our senior editor for AI, pointed out not too long ago: that all the big players […]
- In 2022, Randall Pietersen, a civil engineer in the U.S. Air Force, set out on a training mission to assess damage at an airfield runway, practicing “base recovery” protocol after a simulated attack. For hours, his team walked over the area in chemical protection gear, radioing in geocoordinates as they documented damage and looked for […]
- Generative AI models are getting closer to taking action in the real world. Already, the big AI companies are introducing AI agents that can take care of web-based busywork for you, ordering your groceries or making your dinner reservation. Today, Google DeepMind announced two generative AI models designed to power tomorrow’s robots. The models are […]
- Google DeepMind has released a new model, Gemini Robotics, that combines its best large language model with robotics. Plugging in the LLM seems to give robots the ability to be more dexterous, work from natural-language commands, and generalize across tasks. All three are things that robots have struggled to do until now. The team hopes […]
- Since the general AI agent Manus was launched last week, it has spread online like wildfire. And not just in China, where it was developed by the Wuhan-based startup Butterfly Effect. It’s made its way into the global conversation, with influential voices in tech, including Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey and Hugging Face product lead Victor […]
- The Canadian robotruck startup Waabi says its super-realistic virtual simulation is now accurate enough to prove the safety of its driverless big rigs without having to run them for miles on real roads. The company uses a digital twin of its real-world robotruck, loaded up with real sensor data, and measures how the twin’s performance […]
- So far, AI has only nipped at the edge of the games industry with tools for art, music, writing, coding, and other elements that make up video games. But what if an AI model could generate examples of gameplay from a single screenshot?That’s the idea behind Microsoft’s Muse, a transformer model with 1.6 billion parameters […]
- A new pair of AI benchmarks could help developers reduce bias in AI models, potentially making them fairer and less likely to cause harm. The research, from a team based at Stanford, was posted to the arXiv preprint server in early February. The researchers were inspired to look into the problem of bias after witnessing […]
- This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. The concept of artificial general intelligence—an ultra-powerful AI system we don’t have yet—can be thought of as a balloon, repeatedly inflated with hype during peaks of optimism (or fear) about its potential […]