One might argue that one of the primary duties of a physician is to constantly evaluate and re-evaluate the odds: What are the chances of a medical procedure’s success? Is the patient at risk of developing severe symptoms? When should the patient return for more testing? Amidst these critical deliberations, the rise of artificial intelligence…
If someone advises you to “know your limits,” they’re likely suggesting you do things like exercise in moderation. To a robot, though, the motto represents learning constraints, or limitations of a specific task within the machine’s environment, to do chores safely and correctly. For instance, imagine asking a robot to clean your kitchen when it…
Google DeepMind has announced an impressive grab bag of new products and prototypes that may just let it seize back its lead in the race to turn generative artificial intelligence into a mass-market concern. Top billing goes to Gemini 2.0—the latest iteration of Google DeepMind’s family of multimodal large language models, now redesigned around the…
Like many others, I recently fled social media platform X for Bluesky. In the process, I started following many of the people I followed on X. On Thanksgiving, I was delighted to see a private message from a fellow AI reporter, Will Knight from Wired. Or at least that’s who I thought I was talking…
Machine-learning models can fail when they try to make predictions for individuals who were underrepresented in the datasets they were trained on. For instance, a model that predicts the best treatment option for someone with a chronic disease may be trained using a dataset that contains mostly male patients. That model might make incorrect predictions…
Large language models (LLMs) that drive generative artificial intelligence apps, such as ChatGPT, have been proliferating at lightning speed and have improved to the point that it is often impossible to distinguish between something written through generative AI and human-composed text. However, these models can also sometimes generate false statements or display a political bias….
Alibaba’s latest model, QwQ-32B-Preview, has gained some impressive reviews for its reasoning abilities. Like OpenAI’s GPT-4 o1,1 its training has emphasized reasoning rather than just reproducing language. That seemed like something worth testing out—or at least playing around with—so when I heard that it very quickly became available in Ollama and wasn’t too large to…
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. The AI sector is plagued by a lack of competition and a lot of deceit—or at least that’s one way to interpret the latest flurry of actions taken in Washington. Last…
One afternoon in late November, I visited a weapons test site in the foothills east of San Clemente, California operated by Anduril, a maker of AI-powered drones and missiles that recently announced a partnership with OpenAI. I went there to witness a new system it’s expanding today, which allows external parties to tap into its…
Machine-learning models can make mistakes and be difficult to use, so scientists have developed explanation methods to help users understand when and how they should trust a model’s predictions. These explanations are often complex, however, perhaps containing information about hundreds of model features. And they are sometimes presented as multifaceted visualizations that can be difficult…