The ability to generate high-quality images quickly is crucial for producing realistic simulated environments that can be used to train self-driving cars to avoid unpredictable hazards, making them safer on real streets. But the generative artificial intelligence techniques increasingly being used to produce such images have drawbacks. One popular type of model, called a diffusion…
As director of the MIT BioMicro Center (BMC), Stuart Levine ’97 wholeheartedly embraces the variety of challenges he tackles each day. One of over 50 core facilities providing shared resources across the Institute, the BMC supplies integrated high-throughput genomics, single-cell and spatial transcriptomic analysis, bioinformatics support, and data management to researchers across MIT. “Every day…
There has never been a more pressing time for food producers to harness technology to tackle the sector’s tough mission. To produce ever more healthy and appealing food for a growing global population in a way that is resilient and affordable, all while minimizing waste and reducing the sector’s environmental impact. From farm to factory,…
Ben Vinson III, president of Howard University, made a compelling call for artificial intelligence to be “developed with wisdom,” as he delivered MIT’s annual Karl Taylor Compton Lecture on campus Monday. The broad-ranging talk posed a series of searching questions about our human ideals and practices, and was anchored in the view that, as Vinson…
If your company is building any kind of AI product or tool, congratulations! You are now an AI company. Yes, you’re still a retail company. Or a bank. Or a CPG operation. You’re that plus an AI company—let’s call this an AI as Well company (AIAW)—granting you a license to tell sales prospects and investors…
Last Wednesday, Google made a somewhat surprising announcement. It launched a version of its AI model, Gemini, that can do things not just in the digital realm of chatbots and internet search but out here in the physical world, via robots. Gemini Robotics fuses the power of large language models with spatial reasoning, allowing you…
This story originally appeared in The Debrief with Mat Honan, a weekly newsletter about the biggest stories in tech from our editor in chief. Sign up here to get the next one in your inbox. I’ve been mulling over something that Will Heaven, our senior editor for AI, pointed out not too long ago: that all the big players…
In 2022, Randall Pietersen, a civil engineer in the U.S. Air Force, set out on a training mission to assess damage at an airfield runway, practicing “base recovery” protocol after a simulated attack. For hours, his team walked over the area in chemical protection gear, radioing in geocoordinates as they documented damage and looked for…
Google DeepMind has released a new model, Gemini Robotics, that combines its best large language model with robotics. Plugging in the LLM seems to give robots the ability to be more dexterous, work from natural-language commands, and generalize across tasks. All three are things that robots have struggled to do until now. The team hopes…
Since general AI agent Manus was launched last week, it has spread online like wildfire. And not just in China either, where it was developed by Wuhan-based startup Butterfly Effect. It’s made its way into the global conversation, with influential voices in tech, including Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and Hugging Face product lead Victor Mustar,…