Over the years, many of us have become accustomed to letting computers do our thinking for us. “That’s what the computer says” is a refrain in many bad customer service interactions. “That’s what the data says” is a variation—“the data” doesn’t say much if you don’t know how it was collected and how the data…
This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get it in your inbox first, sign up here. When the generative AI boom started with ChatGPT in late 2022, we were sold a vision of superintelligent AI tools that know everything, can replace the boring bits of work, and supercharge productivity and…
Do you fancy your chances of beating a robot at a game of table tennis? Google DeepMind has trained a robot to play the game at the equivalent of amateur-level competitive performance, the company has announced. It claims it’s the first time a robot has been taught to play a sport with humans at a…
The phrase “practice makes perfect” is usually reserved for humans, but it’s also a great maxim for robots newly deployed in unfamiliar environments. Picture a robot arriving in a warehouse. It comes packaged with the skills it was trained on, like placing an object, and now it needs to pick items from a shelf it’s…
For many years now, cloud solutions have helped organizations streamline their operations, increase their scalability, and reduce costs. Yet, enterprise cloud investment has been fragmented, often lacking a coherent organization-wide approach. In fact, it’s not uncommon for various teams across an organization to have spun up their own cloud projects, adopting a wide variety of…
Dimitris Bertsimas PhD ’88 has been appointed vice provost for open learning at MIT, effective Sept. 1. In this role, Bertsimas, who is the Boeing Leaders for Global Operations Professor of Management at MIT, will work with partners across the Institute to transform teaching and learning on and off MIT’s campus. Provost Cynthia Barnhart announced…
Yoshua Bengio, a Turing Award winner who is considered one of the “godfathers” of modern AI, is throwing his weight behind a project funded by the UK government to embed safety mechanisms into AI systems. The project, called Safeguarded AI, aims to build an AI system that can check whether other AI systems deployed in…
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. It’s the Taylor Swifts of the world that are going to save us. In January, nude deepfakes of Taylor Swift went viral on X, which caused public outrage. Nonconsensual explicit deepfakes are one…
Giddy predictions about AI, from its contributions to economic growth to the onset of mass automation, are now as frequent as the release of powerful new generative AI models. The consultancy PwC, for example, predicts that AI could boost global gross domestic product (GDP) 14% by 2030, generating US $15.7 trillion. Forty percent of our…
AI concerns overemphasize harms arising from subversion rather than seduction. Worries about AI often imagine doomsday scenarios where systems escape human control or even understanding. Short of those nightmares, there are nearer-term harms we should take seriously: that AI could jeopardize public discourse through misinformation; cement biases in loan decisions, judging or hiring; or disrupt…