This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get it in your inbox first, sign up here. Welcome back to The Algorithm! This week we’re going to talk about OpenAI’s impressive new reasoning model, called o1. I want to illustrate why it’s such a big deal with an example from my wedding…
Ever been asked a question you only knew part of the answer to? To give a more informed response, your best move would be to phone a friend with more knowledge on the subject. This collaborative process can also help large language models (LLMs) improve their accuracy. Still, it’s been difficult to teach LLMs to…
In the past couple of years, regulators have been caught off guard again and again as tech companies compete to launch ever more advanced AI models. It’s only a matter of time before labs release another round of models that pose new regulatory challenges. We’re likely just weeks away, for example, from OpenAI’s release of…
The internet has made it easier than ever before to encounter and spread conspiracy theories. And while some are harmless, others can be deeply damaging, sowing discord and even leading to unnecessary deaths. Now, researchers believe they’ve uncovered a new tool for combating false conspiracy theories: AI chatbots. Researchers from MIT Sloan and Cornell University…
As long as chatbots have been around, they have made things up. Such “hallucinations” are an inherent part of how AI models work. However, they’re a big problem for companies betting big on AI, like Google, because they make the responses it generates unreliable. Google is releasing a tool today to address the issue. Called…
A recent article in Computerworld argued that the output from generative AI systems, like GPT and Gemini, isn’t as good as it used to be. It isn’t the first time I’ve heard this complaint, though I don’t know how widely held that opinion is. But I wonder: is it correct? And why? I think a…
Shawn Shan is one of MIT Technology Review’s 2024 Innovators Under 35. Meet the rest of this year’s honorees. When image-generating models such as DALL-E 2, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion kick-started the generative AI boom in early 2022, artists started noticing odd similarities between AI-generated images and those they’d created themselves. Many found that their work…
This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get it in your inbox first, sign up here. Video game development has long been plagued by fear of the “crunch”—essentially, being forced to work overtime on a game to meet a deadline. In the early days of video games, the crunch was often…
To the untrained eye, a medical image like an MRI or X-ray appears to be a murky collection of black-and-white blobs. It can be a struggle to decipher where one structure (like a tumor) ends and another begins. When trained to understand the boundaries of biological structures, AI systems can segment (or delineate) regions of…
Robots perceive the world around them very differently from the way humans do. When we walk down the street, we know what we need to pay attention to—passing cars, potential dangers, obstacles in our way—and what we don’t, like pedestrians walking in the distance. Robots, on the other hand, treat all the information they receive…