Latest from MIT Tech Review – Exquisite bullshitters

Research that crosses the traditional boundaries of academic disciplines, and boundaries between academia, industry, and government, is increasingly widespread, and has sometimes led to the spawning of significant new disciplines. But Munther Dahleh, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, says that such multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary work often suffers from a number…

Google released the first phase of its next-generation AI model, Gemini, today. Gemini reflects years of efforts from inside Google, overseen and driven by its CEO Sundar Pichai. (You can read all about Gemini in our report from Melissa Heikkila and Will Douglas Heaven here.)  Pichai, who previously oversaw Chrome and Android, is famously product-obsessed….

The trick to making a good AI-powered chatbot might be to have humans tell it how to behave—and force the model to back up its claims using the internet, according to a new paper by Alphabet-owned AI lab DeepMind.  In a new non-peer-reviewed paper out today, the team unveils Sparrow, an AI chatbot that is…

For a reporter who covers AI, one of the biggest stories this year has been the rise of large language models. These are AI models that produce text a human might have written—sometimes so convincingly they have tricked people into thinking they are sentient.  These models’ power comes from troves of publicly available human-created text…

ChatGPT and other deep generative models are proving to be uncanny mimics. These AI supermodels can churn out poems, finish symphonies, and create new videos and images by automatically learning from millions of examples of previous works. These enormously powerful and versatile tools excel at generating new content that resembles everything they’ve seen before. But…

Google DeepMind has unveiled new artificial-intelligence software that could help historians recover the meaning and context behind ancient Latin engravings.  Aeneas can analyze words written in long-weathered stone to say when and where they were originally inscribed. It follows Google’s previous archaeological tool Ithaca, which also used deep learning to reconstruct and contextualize ancient text,…