Imagine going for dinner with a group of friends who switch in and out of different languages you don’t speak, but still being able to understand what they’re saying. This scenario is the inspiration for a new AI headphone system that translates the speech of multiple speakers simultaneously, in real time. The system, called Spatial Speech Translation, tracks the direction and vocal characteristics of each speaker, helping the person wearing the headphones to identify who is saying what in a group setting.  “There are so many smart people across the world, and the language barrier prevents them from having the […]

It’s not easy being one of Silicon Valley’s favorite benchmarks.  SWE-Bench (pronounced “swee bench”) launched in November 2024 to evaluate an AI model’s coding skill, using more than 2,000 real-world programming problems pulled from the public GitHub repositories of 12 different Python-based projects.  In the months since then, it’s quickly become one of the most popular tests in AI. A SWE-Bench score has become a mainstay of major model releases from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google—and outside of foundation models, the fine-tuners at AI firms are in constant competition to see who can rise above the pack. The top of the […]

There’s something that bothers me about the chatter that AI is making “intelligence” ubiquitous. For example, in a recent Bloomberg article, “AI Will Upend a Basic Assumption About How Companies Are Organized,” Azeem Azhar wrote: As intelligence becomes cheaper and faster, the basic assumption underpinning our institutions—that human insight is scarce and expensive—no longer holds. When you can effectively consult a dozen experts anytime you like, it changes how companies organize, how we innovate and how each of us approaches learning and decision-making. The question facing individuals and organizations alike is: What will you do when intelligence itself is suddenly […]