ChatGPT maker OpenAI has built an experimental large language model that is far easier to understand than typical models. That’s a big deal, because today’s LLMs are black boxes: Nobody fully understands how they do what they do. Building a model that is more transparent sheds light on how LLMs work in general, helping researchers figure out why models hallucinate, why they go off the rails, and just how far we should trust them with critical tasks. “As these AI systems get more powerful, they’re going to get integrated more and more into very important domains,” Leo Gao, a research […]

Google DeepMind has built a new video-game-playing agent called SIMA 2 that can navigate and solve problems in a wide range of 3D virtual worlds. The company claims it’s a big step toward more general-purpose agents and better real-world robots.    Google DeepMind first demoed SIMA (which stands for “scalable instructable multiworld agent”) last year. But SIMA 2 has been built on top of Gemini, the firm’s flagship large language model, which gives the agent a huge boost in capability. The researchers claim that SIMA 2 can carry out a range of more complex tasks inside virtual worlds, figure out how […]

The following originally appeared on Asimov’s Addendum and is being republished here with the author’s permission. The other day, I was looking for parking information at Dulles International Airport, and was delighted with the conciseness and accuracy of Google’s AI overview. It was much more convenient than being told that the information could be found at the flydulles.com website, visiting it, perhaps landing on the wrong page, and finding the information I needed after a few clicks. It’s also a win from the provider side. Dulles isn’t trying to monetize its website (except to the extent that it helps people […]