Welcome back to The State of AI, a new collaboration between the Financial Times and MIT Technology Review. Every Monday, writers from both publications debate one aspect of the generative AI revolution reshaping global power. In this conversation, Helen Warrell, FT investigations reporter and former defense and security editor, and James O’Donnell, MIT Technology Review’s…
Headlines surfaced by a simple “job market” search describe it as “a humiliation ritual” or “hell” and “an emerging crisis for entry-level workers.” The unemployment rate in the US for recent graduates is at an “unusually high” 5.8%—even Harvard Business School graduates have been taking months to find work. Inextricable from this conversation is the…
ChatGPT maker OpenAI has built an experimental large language model that is far easier to understand than typical models. That’s a big deal, because today’s LLMs are black boxes: Nobody fully understands how they do what they do. Building a model that is more transparent sheds light on how LLMs work in general, helping researchers…
Google DeepMind has built a new video-game-playing agent called SIMA 2 that can navigate and solve problems in a wide range of 3D virtual worlds. The company claims it’s a big step toward more general-purpose agents and better real-world robots. Google DeepMind first demoed SIMA (which stands for “scalable instructable multiworld agent”) last year. But…
The following originally appeared on Asimov’s Addendum and is being republished here with the author’s permission. The other day, I was looking for parking information at Dulles International Airport, and was delighted with the conciseness and accuracy of Google’s AI overview. It was much more convenient than being told that the information could be found…
The following article originally appeared on Medium and is being republished here with the author’s permission. Early on, I caught myself saying “you” to my AI tools—“Can you add retries?” “Great idea!”—like I was talking to a junior dev. And then I’d get mad when it didn’t “understand” me. That’s on me. These models aren’t…
For years, many chief information officers (CIOs) looked at VMware-to-cloud migrations with a wary pragmatism. Manually mapping dependencies and rewriting legacy apps mid-flight was not an enticing, low-lift proposition for enterprise IT teams. But the calculus for such decisions has changed dramatically in a short period of time. Following recent VMware licensing changes, organizations are…
We’ve been bombarded with claims about how much generative AI improves software developer productivity: It turns regular programmers into 10x programmers, and 10x programmers into 100x. And even more recently, we’ve been (somewhat less, but still) bombarded with the other side of the story: METR reports that, despite software developers’ belief that their productivity has…
What can we learn about human intelligence by studying how machines “think?” Can we better understand ourselves if we better understand the artificial intelligence systems that are becoming a more significant part of our everyday lives? These questions may be deeply philosophical, but for Phillip Isola, finding the answers is as much about computation as…
AI and quantum technologies are dramatically reconfiguring how cybersecurity functions, redefining the speed and scale with which digital defenders and their adversaries can operate. The weaponization of AI tools for cyberattacks is already proving a worthy opponent to current defenses. From reconnaissance to ransomware, cybercriminals can automate attacks faster than ever before with AI. This…