When Tomás Vega SM ’19 was 5 years old, he began to stutter. The experience gave him an appreciation for the adversity that can come with a disability. It also showed him the power of technology. “A keyboard and a mouse were outlets,” Vega says. “They allowed me to be fluent in the things I did….
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Greetings from Switzerland! I’ve just come back from Geneva, which last week hosted the UN’s AI for Good Summit, organized by the International Telecommunication Union. The summit’s big focus was how AI can…
Let’s say you want to train a robot so it understands how to use tools and can then quickly learn to make repairs around your house with a hammer, wrench, and screwdriver. To do that, you would need an enormous amount of data demonstrating tool use. Existing robotic datasets vary widely in modality — some…
Read Part I of this series here and stay tuned for Part III.To hear directly from the authors on this topic, sign up for the upcoming virtual event on June 20th, and learn more from the Generative AI Success Stories Superstream on June 12th. A possibly apocryphal quote attributed to many leaders reads: “Amateurs talk strategy and…
MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more here. When Google announced it was rolling out its artificial intelligence-powered search feature earlier this month, the company promised that “Google will do the googling for you.” The new feature,…
If a hiker gets lost in the rugged Scottish Highlands, rescue teams sometimes send up a drone to search for clues of the individual’s route—trampled vegetation, dropped clothing, food wrappers. But with vast terrain to cover and limited battery life, picking the right area to search is critical. Traditionally, expert drone pilots use a combination…
The ability of LLMs to execute commands through plain language (e.g. English) has enabled agentic systems that can complete a user query by orchestrating the right set of tools (e.g. ToolFormer, Gorilla). This, along with the recent multi-modal efforts such as the GPT-4o or Gemini-1.5 model, has expanded the realm of possibilities with AI agents….
Generative AI, like predictive AI before it, has rightly seized the attention of business executives. The technology has the potential to add trillions of dollars to annual global economic activity, and its adoption for business applications is expected to improve the top or bottom lines—or both—at many organizations. While generative AI offers an impressive and…
The internet is awash in instructional videos that can teach curious viewers everything from cooking the perfect pancake to performing a life-saving Heimlich maneuver. But pinpointing when and where a particular action happens in a long video can be tedious. To streamline the process, scientists are trying to teach computers to perform this task. Ideally,…
Researchers from the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Google Research may have just performed digital sorcery — in the form of a diffusion model that can change the material properties of objects in images. Dubbed Alchemist, the system allows users to alter four attributes of both real and AI-generated pictures: roughness,…