“Mitigating the risk of extinction from A.I. should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war,” according to a statement signed by more than 350 business and technical leaders, including the developers of today’s most important AI platforms. Among the possible risks leading to that outcome is what is…
The world changed on November 30, 2022 as surely as it did on August 12, 1908 when the first Model T left the Ford assembly line. That was the date when OpenAI released ChatGPT, the day that AI emerged from research labs into an unsuspecting world. Within two months, ChatGPT had over a hundred million…
The rapid advance of artificial intelligence has generated a lot of buzz, with some predicting it will lead to an idyllic utopia and others warning it will bring the end of humanity. But speculation about where AI technology is going, while important, can also drown out important conversations about how we should be handling the…
MIT’s School of Engineering and global health care company Novo Nordisk has announced the launch of a multi-year program to support postdoctoral fellows conducting research at the intersection of artificial intelligence and data science with life sciences. The MIT-Novo Nordisk Artificial Intelligence Postdoctoral Fellows Program will welcome its first cohort of up to 10 postdocs…
David H. Autor, Ford Professor of Economics at MIT, has been recognized as one of two 2023 NOMIS Distinguished Scientists for his significant contributions and ongoing research work to understand the effects of technological change and globalization on jobs and earnings prospects for workers. Anne Brunet of Stanford University is the other winner for this…
Marcos Seefelder, Software Engineer, and Daniel Duckworth, Research Software Engineer, Google Research When choosing a venue, we often find ourselves with questions like the following: Does this restaurant have the right vibe for a date? Is there good outdoor seating? Are there enough screens to watch the game? While photos and videos may partially answer…
How are waves of disruptive technologies, such as more advanced versions of artificial intelligence systems, changing the way we work, live, and play? Are there pathways that academics, practitioners, innovators, and entrepreneurs ought to be pursuing to ensure that the largest share of the benefits associated with new technologies uplift the most marginalized populations? What…
Posted by Junfeng He, Senior Research Scientist, and Kai Kohlhoff, Staff Research Scientist, Google Research People have the remarkable ability to take in a tremendous amount of information (estimated to be ~1010 bits/s entering the retina) and selectively attend to a few task-relevant and interesting regions for further processing (e.g., memory, comprehension, action). Modeling human…
A few months ago, I wrote about some experiments with prime numbers. I generated a 16-digit non-prime number by multiplying two 8-digit prime numbers, and asked ChatGPT (using GPT -3.5) whether the larger number was prime. It answered correctly that the number was non-prime, but when it told me the number’s prime factors, it was clearly wrong….
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. This week I’ve been thinking a lot about the human labor behind fancy AI models. The secret to making AI chatbots sound smart and spew less toxic nonsense is to use a…