The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Ai2), a research nonprofit, is releasing a family of open-source multimodal language models, called Molmo, that it says perform as well as top proprietary models from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. The organization claims that its biggest Molmo model, which has 72 billion parameters, outperforms OpenAI’s GPT-4o, which is estimated…
OpenAI is broadening access to Advanced Voice Mode, a feature of ChatGPT that allows you to speak more naturally with the AI model. It allows you to interrupt its responses mid-sentence, and can also sense and interpret your emotions based on your tone of voice and adjust its responses accordingly. These features were teased back…
Fifteen technologies developed either wholly or in part by MIT Lincoln Laboratory have been named recipients of 2024 R&D 100 Awards. The awards are given by R&D World, an online publication that serves research scientists and engineers worldwide. Dubbed the “Oscars of Innovation,” the awards recognize the 100 most significant technologies transitioned to use or introduced into the…
Every day across Hollywood, scores of film school graduates and production assistants work as script readers. Their job is to find the diamonds in the rough from the 50,000 or so screenplays pitched each year and flag any worth pursuing further. Each script runs anywhere from 100 to 150 pages, and it can take half…
AI systems are increasingly being deployed in safety-critical health care situations. Yet these models sometimes hallucinate incorrect information, make biased predictions, or fail for unexpected reasons, which could have serious consequences for patients and clinicians. In a commentary article published today in Nature Computational Science, MIT Associate Professor Marzyeh Ghassemi and Boston University Associate Professor Elaine…
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. If it’s not broken, don’t fix it. That’s the approach bad state actors seem to have taken when it comes to how they mess with elections around the world. When the…
The pharmaceutical manufacturing industry has long struggled with the issue of monitoring the characteristics of a drying mixture, a critical step in producing medication and chemical compounds. At present, there are two noninvasive characterization approaches that are typically used: A sample is either imaged and individual particles are counted, or researchers use a scattered light…
Sample language model responses to different varieties of English and native speaker reactions. ChatGPT does amazingly well at communicating with people in English. But whose English? Only 15% of ChatGPT users are from the US, where Standard American English is the default. But the model is also commonly used in countries and communities where people…
It’s tricky to get robots to do things in environments they’ve never seen before. Typically, researchers need to train them on new data for every new place they encounter, which can become very time-consuming and expensive. Now, researchers have developed a series of AI models that teach robots to complete basic tasks in new surroundings…
For more than 100 years, scientists have been using X-ray crystallography to determine the structure of crystalline materials such as metals, rocks, and ceramics. This technique works best when the crystal is intact, but in many cases, scientists have only a powdered version of the material, which contains random fragments of the crystal. This makes…