Latest from MIT Tech Review – We finally have a definition for open-source AI

Open-source AI is everywhere right now. The problem is, no one agrees on what it actually is. Now we may finally have an answer. The Open Source Initiative (OSI), the self-appointed arbiters of what it means to be open source, has released a new definition, which it hopes will help lawmakers develop regulations to protect…

Latest from MIT Tech Review – A new system lets robots sense human touch without artificial skin

Even the most capable robots aren’t great at sensing human touch; you typically need a computer science degree or at least a tablet to interact with them effectively. That may change, thanks to robots that can now sense and interpret touch without being covered in high-tech artificial skin. It’s a significant step toward robots that…

Latest from MIT Tech Review – Why you’re about to see a lot more drones in the sky

This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get it in your inbox first, sign up here. If you follow drone news closely—and you’re forgiven if you don’t—you may have noticed over the last few months that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has been quite busy. For decades, the agency had been…

Latest from MIT : 3 Questions: How to prove humanity online

As artificial intelligence agents become more advanced, it could become increasingly difficult to distinguish between AI-powered users and real humans on the internet. In a new white paper, researchers from MIT, OpenAI, Microsoft, and other tech companies and academic institutions propose the use of personhood credentials, a verification technique that enables someone to prove they…

Latest from MIT Tech Review – What’s next for drones

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. Drones have been a mainstay technology among militaries, hobbyists, and first responders alike for more than a decade, and in that time the range available has skyrocketed….

Latest from MIT Tech Review – DHS plans to collect biometric data from migrant children “down to the infant”

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plans to collect and analyze photos of the faces of migrant children at the border in a bid to improve facial recognition technology, MIT Technology Review can reveal. This includes children “down to the infant,” according to John Boyd, assistant director of the department’s Office of Biometric Identity…

Latest from MIT : New open-source tool helps to detangle the brain

In late 2023, the first drug with potential to slow the progression of Alzheimer’s disease was approved by the U.S. Federal Drug Administration. Alzheimer’s is one of many debilitating neurological disorders that together affect one-eighth of the world’s population, and while the new drug is a step in the right direction, there is still a long…

Latest from MIT : LLMs develop their own understanding of reality as their language abilities improve

Ask a large language model (LLM) like GPT-4 to smell a rain-soaked campsite, and it’ll politely decline. Ask the same system to describe that scent to you, and it’ll wax poetic about “an air thick with anticipation” and “a scent that is both fresh and earthy,” despite having neither prior experience with rain nor a…

Latest from MIT Tech Review – A new public database lists all the ways AI could go wrong

Adopting AI can be fraught with danger. Systems could be biased, or parrot falsehoods, or even become addictive. And that’s before you consider the possibility AI could be used to create new biological or chemical weapons, or even one day somehow spin out of our control.  To manage these potential risks, we first need to…

Latest from MIT : MIT researchers use large language models to flag problems in complex systems

Identifying one faulty turbine in a wind farm, which can involve looking at hundreds of signals and millions of data points, is akin to finding a needle in a haystack. Engineers often streamline this complex problem using deep-learning models that can detect anomalies in measurements taken repeatedly over time by each turbine, known as time-series…