Latest from MIT Tech Review – How this grassroots effort could make AI voices more diverse

We are on the cusp of a voice AI boom, with tech companies such as Apple and OpenAI rolling out the next generation of artificial-intelligence-powered assistants. But the default voices for these assistants are often white American—British, if you’re lucky—and most definitely speak English. They represent only a tiny proportion of the many dialects and…

Latest from MIT Tech Review – Google DeepMind has a new way to look inside an AI’s “mind”

AI has led to breakthroughs in drug discovery and robotics and is in the process of entirely revolutionizing how we interact with machines and the web. The only problem is we don’t know exactly how it works, or why it works so well. We have a fair idea, but the details are too complex to…

Latest from MIT Tech Review – Unlocking the mysteries of complex biological systems with agentic AI

The complexity of biology has long been a double-edged sword for scientific and medical progress. On one hand, the intricacy of systems (like the human immune response) offers countless opportunities for breakthroughs in medicine and healthcare. On the other hand, that very complexity has often stymied researchers, leaving some of the most significant medical challenges—like…

Latest from MIT Tech Review – The AI lab waging a guerrilla war over exploitative AI

Ben Zhao remembers well the moment he officially jumped into the fight between artists and generative AI: when one artist asked for AI bananas.  A computer security researcher at the University of Chicago, Zhao had made a name for himself by building tools to protect images from facial recognition technology. It was this work that…

Latest from MIT : Graph-based AI model maps the future of innovation

Imagine using artificial intelligence to compare two seemingly unrelated creations — biological tissue and Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 9.” At first glance, a living system and a musical masterpiece might appear to have no connection. However, a novel AI method developed by Markus J. Buehler, the McAfee Professor of Engineering and professor of civil and environmental…

Latest from MIT : 3 Questions: Inverting the problem of design

The process of computational design in mechanical engineering often begins with a problem or a goal, followed by an assessment of literature, resources, and systems available to address the issue. The Design Computation and Digital Engineering (DeCoDE) Lab at MIT instead explores the bounds of what is possible. Working with the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab,…

UC Berkeley – Virtual Personas for Language Models via an Anthology of Backstories

<!– We introduce Anthology, a method for conditioning LLMs to representative, consistent, and diverse virtual personas by generating and utilizing naturalistic backstories with rich details of individual values and experience. –> We introduce Anthology, a method for conditioning LLMs to representative, consistent, and diverse virtual personas by generating and utilizing naturalistic backstories with rich details…

Latest from MIT Tech Review – Generative AI taught a robot dog to scramble around a new environment

Teaching robots to navigate new environments is tough. You can train them on physical, real-world data taken from recordings made by humans, but that’s scarce, and expensive to collect. Digital simulations are a rapid, scalable way to teach them to do new things, but the robots often fail when they’re pulled out of virtual worlds…

Latest from MIT Tech Review – Africa’s AI researchers are ready for takeoff

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. When we talk about the global race for AI dominance, the conversation often focuses on tensions between the US and China, and European efforts at regulating the technology.  But it’s high…