In a recent newsletter, Ben Thompson suggested paying attention to a portion of Jensen Huang’s keynote at NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in DC, calling it “an excellent articulation of the thesis that the AI market is orders of magnitude bigger than the software market.” While I’m reluctant to contradict as astute an observer as…
A robot searching for workers trapped in a partially collapsed mine shaft must rapidly generate a map of the scene and identify its location within that scene as it navigates the treacherous terrain. Researchers have recently started building powerful machine-learning models to perform this complex task using only images from the robot’s onboard cameras, but…
The following article originally appeared on Gradient Flow and is being reposted here with the author’s permission. We’re living through a peculiar moment in AI development. On one hand, the demos are spectacular: agents that reason and plan with apparent ease, models that compose original songs from a text prompt, and research tools that produce…
The next time you use a tool like ChatGPT or Perplexity, stop and count the total words being generated to fulfill your request. Each word results from a process called inference—the revenue-generation mechanism of AI systems where each word generated can be analyzed using basic financial and economic business principles. The goal of performing this…
With the rapid advancement of generative artificial intelligence, teachers and school leaders are looking for answers to complicated questions about successfully integrating technology into lessons, while also ensuring students actually learn what they’re trying to teach. Justin Reich, an associate professor in MIT’s Comparative Media Studies/Writing program, hopes a new guidebook published by the MIT Teaching Systems…
A recent study from Oregon State University estimated that more than 3,500 animal species are at risk of extinction because of factors including habitat alterations, natural resources being overexploited, and climate change. To better understand these changes and protect vulnerable wildlife, conservationists like MIT PhD student and Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) researcher Justin…
Managing a power grid is like trying to solve an enormous puzzle. Grid operators must ensure the proper amount of power is flowing to the right areas at the exact time when it is needed, and they must do this in a way that minimizes costs without overloading physical infrastructure. Even more, they must solve…
Are you feeling it? I hear it’s close: two years, five years—maybe next year! And I hear it’s going to change everything: it will cure disease, save the planet, and usher in an age of abundance. It will solve our biggest problems in ways we cannot yet imagine. It will redefine what it means to…
It’s become a truism that facts alone don’t change people’s minds. Perhaps nowhere is this more clear than when it comes to conspiracy theories: Many people believe that you can’t talk conspiracists out of their beliefs. But that’s not necessarily true. It turns out that many conspiracy believers do respond to evidence and arguments—information that…