Latest from MIT Tech Review – Exquisite bullshitters

In this post, we introduce Koala, a chatbot trained by fine-tuning Meta’s LLaMA on dialogue data gathered from the web. We describe the dataset curation and training process of our model, and also present the results of a user study that compares our model to ChatGPT and Stanford’s Alpaca. Our results show that Koala can…

Posted by Basil Mustafa, Research Software Engineer and Carlos Riquelme, Research Scientist, Google Research, Brain team Sparse models stand out among the most promising approaches for the future of deep learning. Instead of every part of a model processing every input (“dense” modeling), sparse models employing conditional computation learn to route individual inputs to different…

In August 2025, Wang Lei decided it was finally time to say goodbye to his electric vehicle. Wang, who is 39, had bought the car in 2016, when EVs still felt experimental in Beijing. It was a compact Chinese brand. The subsidies were good, and the salesman talked about “supporting domestic innovation.” At the time,…

OpenAI has just released GPT-4.5, a new version of its flagship large language model. The company claims it is its biggest and best model for all-round chat yet. “It’s really a step forward for us,” says Mia Glaese, a research scientist at OpenAI. Since the releases of its so-called reasoning models o1 and o3, OpenAI…

In our current age of artificial intelligence, computers can generate their own “art” by way of diffusion models, iteratively adding structure to a noisy initial state until a clear image or video emerges. Diffusion models have suddenly grabbed a seat at everyone’s table: Enter a few words and experience instantaneous, dopamine-spiking dreamscapes at the intersection…

Amid the benefits that algorithmic decision-making and artificial intelligence offer — including revolutionizing speed, efficiency, and predictive ability in a vast range of fields — Manish Raghavan is working to mitigate associated risks, while also seeking opportunities to apply the technologies to help with preexisting social concerns. “I ultimately want my research to push towards…