Reaching a consensus in a democracy is difficult because people hold such different ideological, political, and social views.  Perhaps an AI tool could help. Researchers from Google DeepMind trained a system of large language models (LLMs) to operate as a “caucus mediator,” generating summaries that outline a group’s areas of agreement on complex but important social or political issues. The researchers say the tool—named the Habermas machine (HM), after the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas—highlights the potential of AI to help groups of people find common ground when discussing such subjects. “The large language model was trained to identify and present […]

Generative AI’s promises for the software development lifecycle (SDLC)—code that writes itself, fully automated test generation, and developers who spend more time innovating than debugging—are as alluring as they are ambitious. Some bullish industry forecasts project a 30% productivity boost from AI developer tools, which, if realized, could inject more than $1.5 trillion into the global GDP. But while there’s little doubt that software development is undergoing a profound transformation, separating the hype and speculation from the realities of implementation and ROI is no simple task. As with previous technological revolutions, the dividends won’t be instant. “There’s an equivalency between […]

In the current AI zeitgeist, sequence models have skyrocketed in popularity for their ability to analyze data and predict what to do next. For instance, you’ve likely used next-token prediction models like ChatGPT, which anticipate each word (token) in a sequence to form answers to users’ queries. There are also full-sequence diffusion models like Sora, which convert words into dazzling, realistic visuals by successively “denoising” an entire video sequence.  Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have proposed a simple change to the diffusion training scheme that makes this sequence denoising considerably more flexible. When applied to […]