Guðni Thorlacius Jóhannesson, the president of Iceland, visited MIT on Friday, engaging in talks with several campus leaders and professors, and touring the Media Lab. Jóhannesson visited the Institute along with a substantial delegation of officials and scholars from Iceland. They met with MIT scholars, who delivered a variety of presentations on research, design, and entrepreneurship; the Iceland delegation also had a particular interest in the inclusion of the Icelandic language in artificial intelligence-driven tools that automatically recognize, translate, and deploy speech and texts. “We are determined to make sure that Icelandic has a place in the digital age,” Jóhannesson […]

Earlier this month, DeepMind presented a new “generalist” AI model called Gato. The model can play the video game Atari, caption images, chat, and stack blocks with a real robot arm, the Alphabet-owned AI lab announced. All in all, Gato can do 604 different tasks.  But while Gato is undeniably fascinating, in the week since its release some researchers have gotten a bit carried away. One of DeepMind’s top researchers and a coauthor of the Gato paper, Nando de Freitas, couldn’t contain his excitement. “The game is over!” he tweeted, suggesting that there is now a clear path from Gato […]

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. The hype around DeepMind’s new AI model misses what’s actually cool about it Earlier this month, DeepMind presented a new “generalist” AI model called Gato. The model can play the video game Atari, caption images, chat, and stack blocks with a real robot arm, the Alphabet-owned AI lab announced. All in all, Gato can do hundreds of different tasks. But while Gato is undeniably fascinating, in the week since its release some researchers have got a bit carried away. […]