O’Reilly Media – AI and the Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Thomas Wolf’s blog post “The Einstein AI Model” is a must-read. He contrasts his thinking about what we need from AI with another must-read, Dario Amodei’s “Machines of Loving Grace.”1 Wolf’s argument is that our most advanced language models aren’t creating anything new; they’re just combining old ideas, old phrases, old words according to probabilistic…

Latest from MIT : MIT Maritime Consortium sets sail

Around 11 billion tons of goods, or about 1.5 tons per person worldwide, are transported by sea each year, representing about 90 percent of global trade by volume. Internationally, the merchant shipping fleet numbers around 110,000 vessels. These ships, and the ports that service them, are significant contributors to the local and global economy —…

Latest from MIT Tech Review – The AI Hype Index: DeepSeek mania, Israel’s spying tool, and cheating at chess

Separating AI reality from hyped-up fiction isn’t always easy. That’s why we’ve created the AI Hype Index—a simple, at-a-glance summary of everything you need to know about the state of the industry. While AI models are certainly capable of creating interesting and sometimes entertaining material, their output isn’t necessarily useful. Google DeepMind is hoping that…

Latest from MIT Tech Review – China built hundreds of AI data centers to catch the AI boom. Now many stand unused.

A year or so ago, Xiao Li was seeing floods of Nvidia chip deals on WeChat. A real estate contractor turned data center project manager, he had pivoted to AI infrastructure in 2023, drawn by the promise of China’s AI craze.  At that time, traders in his circle bragged about securing shipments of high-performing Nvidia…

Latest from MIT Tech Review – OpenAI’s new image generator aims to be practical enough for designers and advertisers

OpenAI has released a new image generator that’s designed less for typical surrealist AI art and more for highly controllable and practical creation of visuals—a sign that OpenAI thinks its tools are ready for use in fields like advertising and graphic design.  The image generator, which is now part of the company’s GPT-4o model, was…

O’Reilly Media – Escaping POC Purgatory: Evaluation-Driven Development for AI Systems

Let’s be real: building LLM applications today feels like purgatory. Someone hacks together a quick demo with ChatGPT and LlamaIndex. Leadership gets excited. “We can answer any question about our docs!” But then… reality hits. The system is inconsistent, slow, hallucinating—and that amazing demo starts collecting digital dust. We call this “POC Purgatory”—that frustrating limbo…

Latest from MIT Tech Review – Why the world is looking to ditch US AI models

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. This week’s edition of The Algorithm is brought to you not by your usual host, James O’Donnell, but Eileen Guo, an investigative reporter at MIT Technology Review.  A few weeks ago, when…

UC Berkeley – Scaling Up Reinforcement Learning for Traffic Smoothing: A 100-AV Highway Deployment

Training Diffusion Models with Reinforcement Learning We deployed 100 reinforcement learning (RL)-controlled cars into rush-hour highway traffic to smooth congestion and reduce fuel consumption for everyone. Our goal is to tackle “stop-and-go” waves, those frustrating slowdowns and speedups that usually have no clear cause but lead to congestion and significant energy waste. To train efficient…

Latest from MIT Tech Review – Why handing over total control to AI agents would be a huge mistake

AI agents have set the tech industry abuzz. Unlike chatbots, these groundbreaking new systems operate outside of a chat window, navigating multiple applications to execute complex tasks, like scheduling meetings or shopping online, in response to simple user commands. As agents are developed to become more capable, a crucial question emerges: How much control are…

Latest from MIT Tech Review – OpenAI has released its first research into how using ChatGPT affects people’s emotional wellbeing

OpenAI says over 400 million people use ChatGPT every week. But how does interacting with it affect us? Does it make us more or less lonely? These are some of the questions OpenAI set out to investigate, in partnership with the MIT Media Lab, in a pair of new studies.  They found that only a…