When Nikola Tesla predicted we’d have handheld phones that could display videos, photographs, and more, his musings seemed like a distant dream. Nearly 100 years later, smartphones are like an extra appendage for many of us. Digital fabrication engineers are now working toward expanding the display capabilities of other everyday objects. One avenue they’re exploring is reprogrammable surfaces — or items whose appearances we can digitally alter — to help users present important information, such as health statistics, as well as new designs on things like a wall, mug, or shoe. Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), […]

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. OpenAI’s Olivier Godement, head of product for its platform, and Romain Huet, head of developer experience, are on a whistle-stop tour around the world. Last week, I sat down with the pair in London before DevDay, the company’s annual developer conference. London’s DevDay is the first one for the company outside San Francisco. Godement and Huet are heading to Singapore next.  It’s been a busy few weeks for the company. In London, OpenAI announced updates to […]

Large language models can do impressive things, like write poetry or generate viable computer programs, even though these models are trained to predict words that come next in a piece of text. Such surprising capabilities can make it seem like the models are implicitly learning some general truths about the world. But that isn’t necessarily the case, according to a new study. The researchers found that a popular type of generative AI model can provide turn-by-turn driving directions in New York City with near-perfect accuracy — without having formed an accurate internal map of the city. Despite the model’s uncanny ability […]