Between vacation, end-of-year projects, the coming holidays, and other hysteria, I haven’t come up with an article this month. So here’s a quick list of things that have amazed me recently. Are we virtual yet? I’m far from the first person to find NotebookLM amazing, and I certainly won’t be the last. I did a…
<!– 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…
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…
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…
Kessel Okinga-Koumu paced around a crowded hallway. It was her first time presenting at the Deep Learning Indaba, she told the crowd gathered to hear her, filled with researchers from Africa’s machine-learning community. The annual weeklong conference (‘Indaba’ is a Zulu word for gathering), was held most recently in September at Amadou Mahtar Mbow University…
By studying changes in gene expression, researchers learn how cells function at a molecular level, which could help them understand the development of certain diseases. But a human has about 20,000 genes that can affect each other in complex ways, so even knowing which groups of genes to target is an enormously complicated problem. Also,…
When Nikola Tesla predicted we’d have handheld phones that could display videos, photographs, and more, his musings seemed like a distant dream. Nearly 100 years later, smartphones are like an extra appendage for many of us. Digital fabrication engineers are now working toward expanding the display capabilities of other everyday objects. One avenue they’re exploring is…
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. OpenAI’s Olivier Godement, head of product for its platform, and Romain Huet, head of developer experience, are on a whistle-stop tour around the world. Last week, I sat down with the…
Large language models can do impressive things, like write poetry or generate viable computer programs, even though these models are trained to predict words that come next in a piece of text. Such surprising capabilities can make it seem like the models are implicitly learning some general truths about the world. But that isn’t necessarily…
At the turn of the 20th century, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote about the conditions and culture of Black people in Philadelphia, documenting also the racist attitudes and beliefs that pervaded the white society around them. He described how unequal outcomes in domains like health could be attributed not only to racist ideas, but to racism…