At the top of many automation wish lists is a particularly time-consuming task: chores. The moonshot of many roboticists is cooking up the proper hardware and software combination so that a machine can learn “generalist” policies (the rules and strategies that guide robot behavior) that work everywhere, under all conditions. Realistically, though, if you have a…
The rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI), natural language processing, and computer vision has sparked lofty predictions: AI will revolutionize business operations, transform the nature of knowledge work, and boost companies’ bottom lines and the larger global economy by trillions of dollars. Executives and technology leaders are eager to see these promises realized, and many…
People use large language models for a huge array of tasks, from translating an article to identifying financial fraud. However, despite the incredible capabilities and versatility of these models, they sometimes generate inaccurate responses. On top of that problem, the models can be overconfident about wrong answers or underconfident about correct ones, making it tough for…
The Olympics is all about pushing the frontiers of human performance. As some athletes prepared for the Paris 2024 games, that included using a new technology developed at MIT.nano. The technology was created by Striv (pronounced “strive”), a startup whose founder gained access to the cutting-edge labs and fabrication equipment at MIT.nano as part of…
OpenAI is rolling out an advanced AI chatbot that you can talk to. It’s available today—at least for some. The new chatbot represents OpenAI’s push into a new generation of AI-powered voice assistants in the vein of Siri and Alexa, but with far more capabilities to enable more natural, fluent conversations. It is a step…
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 been another big week in AI. Meta updated its powerful new Llama model, which it’s handing out for free, and OpenAI said it is going to trial an AI-powered online…
Since the beginning of the generative AI boom, content creators have argued that their work has been scraped into AI models without their consent. But until now, it has been difficult to know whether specific text has actually been used in a training data set. Now they have a new way to prove it: “copyright…
AI models can easily generate essays and other types of text. However, they’re nowhere near as good at solving math problems, which tend to involve logical reasoning—something that’s beyond the capabilities of most current AI systems. But that may finally be changing. Google DeepMind says it has trained two specialized AI systems to solve complex…
AI models work by training on huge swaths of data from the internet. But as AI is increasingly being used to pump out web pages filled with junk content, that process is in danger of being undermined. New research published in Nature shows that the quality of the model’s output gradually degrades when AI trains…
Organizations are increasingly utilizing machine-learning models to allocate scarce resources or opportunities. For instance, such models can help companies screen resumes to choose job interview candidates or aid hospitals in ranking kidney transplant patients based on their likelihood of survival. When deploying a model, users typically strive to ensure its predictions are fair by reducing…