Agents are the hottest thing in tech right now. Top firms from Google DeepMind to OpenAI to Anthropic are racing to augment large language models with the ability to carry out tasks by themselves. Known as agentic AI in industry jargon, such systems have fast become the new target of Silicon Valley buzz. Everyone from…
Whether you’re describing the sound of your faulty car engine or meowing like your neighbor’s cat, imitating sounds with your voice can be a helpful way to relay a concept when words don’t do the trick. Vocal imitation is the sonic equivalent of doodling a quick picture to communicate something you saw — except that…
MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here. For the last couple of years we’ve had a go at predicting what’s coming next in AI. A fool’s game given how fast this industry moves. But…
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. The start of a new year, and maybe especially this one, feels like a good time for a gut check: How optimistic are you feeling about the future of technology? Our…
We all know what it means, colloquially, to google something. You pop a few relevant words in a search box and in return get a list of blue links to the most relevant results. Maybe some quick explanations up top. Maybe some maps or sports scores or a video. But fundamentally, it’s just fetching information…
WHO Baidu, Pony AI, Waymo, Wayve, Zoox WHEN Now If you live in certain cities in America or China, you’ve probably spotted driverless cars dropping off passengers. Perhaps you’ve even ridden in one yourself. That’s a radical change from even three years ago, when these services were still learning the rules of the road. And…
WHO Agility, Amazon, Covariant, Robust, Toyota Research Institute WHEN Now Generative AI is causing a paradigm shift in how robots are trained. It’s now clear how we might finally build the sort of truly capable robots that have for decades remained the stuff of science fiction. Robotics researchers are no strangers to artificial intelligence—it has…
WHO Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI WHEN Now Make no mistake: Size matters in the AI world. When OpenAI launched GPT-3 back in 2020, it was the largest language model ever built. The firm showed that supersizing this type of model was enough to send performance through the roof. That…
WHO Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Perplexity WHEN Now Google’s introduction of AI Overviews, powered by its Gemini language model, will alter how billions of people search the internet. And generative search may be the first step toward an AI agent that handles any question you have or task you need done. Rather than returning…
By adapting artificial intelligence models known as large language models, researchers have made great progress in their ability to predict a protein’s structure from its sequence. However, this approach hasn’t been as successful for antibodies, in part because of the hypervariability seen in this type of protein. To overcome that limitation, MIT researchers have developed…