Inside the womb, fetuses can begin to hear some sounds around 20 weeks of gestation. However, the input they are exposed to is limited to low-frequency sounds because of the muffling effect of the amniotic fluid and surrounding tissues. A new MIT-led study suggests that this degraded sensory input is beneficial, and perhaps necessary, for…
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. The dark secret behind those cute AI-generated animal images Another month, another flood of weird, wonderful and cute images generated by an artificial intelligence. In April, OpenAI showed off its new picture-making neural…
Another month, another flood of weird and wonderful images generated by an artificial intelligence. In April, OpenAI showed off its new picture-making neural network, DALL-E 2, which could produce remarkable high-res images of almost anything it was asked to. It outstripped the original DALL-E in almost every way. Now, just a few weeks later, Google…
Posted by Zirui Wang and Jiahui Yu, Research Scientists, Google Research, Brain Team Oftentimes, machine learning (ML) model developers begin their design using a generic backbone model that is trained at scale and with capabilities transferable to a wide range of downstream tasks. In natural language processing, a number of popular backbone models, including BERT,…
Guðni Thorlacius Jóhannesson, the president of Iceland, visited MIT on Friday, engaging in talks with several campus leaders and professors, and touring the Media Lab. Jóhannesson visited the Institute along with a substantial delegation of officials and scholars from Iceland. They met with MIT scholars, who delivered a variety of presentations on research, design, and…
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. The hype around DeepMind’s new AI model misses what’s actually cool about it Earlier this month, DeepMind presented a new “generalist” AI model called Gato. The model can play the video game Atari, caption…
Earlier this month, DeepMind presented a new “generalist” AI model called Gato. The model can play the video game Atari, caption images, chat, and stack blocks with a real robot arm, the Alphabet-owned AI lab announced. All in all, Gato can do 604 different tasks. But while Gato is undeniably fascinating, in the week since…
We recently built the Berkeley Crossword Solver (BCS), the first computer program to beat every human competitor in the world’s top crossword tournament. The BCS combines neural question answering and probabilistic inference to achieve near-perfect performance on most American-style crossword puzzles, like the one shown below: Figure 1: Example American-style crossword puzzle Crosswords are challenging…
The miseducation of algorithms is a critical problem; when artificial intelligence mirrors unconscious thoughts, racism, and biases of the humans who generated these algorithms, it can lead to serious harm. Computer programs, for example, have wrongly flagged Black defendants as twice as likely to reoffend as someone who’s white. When an AI used cost as…
Posted by Jiahui Yu, Senior Research Scientist, and Jing Yu Koh, Research Software Engineer, Google Research In recent years, natural language processing models have dramatically improved their ability to learn general-purpose representations, which has resulted in significant performance gains for a wide range of natural language generation and natural language understanding tasks. In large part,…