This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. In January, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, the head of the world’s most valuable company, proclaimed that we are entering the era of physical AI, when artificial intelligence will move beyond language and chatbots into physically capable machines. (He also said the same thing the year before, by the way.) The implication—fueled by new demonstrations of humanoid robots putting away dishes or assembling cars—is that mimicking human limbs with single-purpose robot arms is the old way of automation. The […]

Large language models (LLMs) have been championed as tools that could democratize access to information worldwide, offering knowledge in a user-friendly interface regardless of a person’s background or location. However, new research from MIT’s Center for Constructive Communication (CCC) suggests these artificial intelligence systems may actually perform worse for the very users who could most benefit from them. A study conducted by researchers at CCC, which is based at the MIT Media Lab, found that state-of-the-art AI chatbots — including OpenAI’s GPT-4, Anthropic’s Claude 3 Opus, and Meta’s Llama 3 — sometimes provide less-accurate and less-truthful responses to users who […]

By now, ChatGPT, Claude, and other large language models have accumulated so much human knowledge that they’re far from simple answer-generators; they can also express abstract concepts, such as certain tones, personalities, biases, and moods. However, it’s not obvious exactly how these models represent abstract concepts to begin with from the knowledge they contain. Now a team from MIT and the University of California San Diego has developed a way to test whether a large language model (LLM) contains hidden biases, personalities, moods, or other abstract concepts. Their method can zero in on connections within a model that encode for a […]