The Dark Ages were not entirely dark. Advances in agriculture and building technology increased Medieval wealth and led to a wave of cathedral construction in Europe. However, it was a time of profound inequality. Elites captured virtually all economic gains. In Britain, as Canterbury Cathedral soared upward, peasants had no net increase in wealth between…
Medical researchers are awash in a tsunami of clinical data. But we need major changes in how we gather, share, and apply this data to bring its benefits to all, says Leo Anthony Celi, principal research scientist at the MIT Laboratory for Computational Physiology (LCP). One key change is to make clinical data of all…
Posted by Deborah Cohen, Staff Research Scientist, and Craig Boutilier, Principal Scientist, Google Research As virtual assistants become ubiquitous, users increasingly interact with them to learn about new topics or obtain recommendations and expect them to deliver capabilities beyond narrow dialogues of one or two turns. Dynamic planning, namely the capability to look ahead and…
Last week Google revealed it is going all in on generative AI. At its annual I/O conference, the company announced it plans to embed AI tools into virtually all of its products, from Google Docs to coding and online search. (Read my story here.) Google’s announcement is a huge deal. Billions of people will now…
Posted by Jerry Wei, Student Researcher, and Denny Zhou, Principal Scientist, Google Research There have recently been tremendous advances in language models, partly because they can perform tasks with strong performance via in-context learning (ICL), a process whereby models are prompted with a few examples of input-label pairs before performing the task on an unseen…
Posted by Candice Schumann, Software Engineer, and Gbolahan O. Olanubi, User Experience Researcher, Google Research Skin tone is an observable characteristic that is subjective, perceived differently by individuals (e.g., depending on their location or culture) and thus is complicated to annotate. That said, the ability to reliably and accurately annotate skin tone is highly important…
Posted by Weicheng Kuo and Anelia Angelova, Research Scientists, Google Research Detection is a fundamental vision task that aims to localize and recognize objects in an image. However, the data collection process of manually annotating bounding boxes or instance masks is tedious and costly, which limits the modern detection vocabulary size to roughly 1,000 object…
Posted by Bryan Wang, Student Researcher, and Yang Li, Research Scientist, Google Research Intelligent assistants on mobile devices have significantly advanced language-based interactions for performing simple daily tasks, such as setting a timer or turning on a flashlight. Despite the progress, these assistants still face limitations in supporting conversational interactions in mobile user interfaces (UIs),…
Last week a leaked memo reported to have been written by Luke Sernau, a senior engineer at Google, said out loud what many in Silicon Valley must have been whispering for weeks: an open-source free-for-all is threatening Big Tech’s grip on AI. New open-source large language models—alternatives to Google’s Bard or OpenAI’s ChatGPT that researchers…
Words, data, and algorithms combine, An article about LLMs, so divine. A glimpse into a linguistic world, Where language machines are unfurled. It was a natural inclination to task a large language model (LLM) like CHATGPT with creating a poem that delves into the topic of large language models, and subsequently utilize said poem as an introductory…