Latest from MIT Tech Review – Gemini Robotics uses Google’s top language model to make robots more useful

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…

Latest from MIT Tech Review – Everyone in AI is talking about Manus. We put it to the test.

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,…

O’Reilly Media – Think Different

There’s something that bothers me about the chatter that AI is making “intelligence” ubiquitous. For example, in a recent Bloomberg article, “How AI reasoning models will change companies and the economy,” Azeem Azhar wrote: As intelligence becomes cheaper and faster, the basic assumption underpinning our institutions — that human insight is scarce and expensive —…

O’Reilly Media – AI’s Future: Not Always Bigger

On May 8, O’Reilly Media will be hosting Coding with AI: The End of Software Development as We Know It—a live virtual tech conference spotlighting how AI is already supercharging developers, boosting productivity, and providing real value to their organizations. If you’re in the trenches building tomorrow’s development practices today and interested in speaking at the…

Latest from MIT Tech Review – Waabi says its virtual robotrucks are realistic enough to prove the real ones are safe

Canadian robotruck startup Waabi says its super-realistic virtual simulation is now accurate enough to prove the safety of its driverless big rigs without having to run them for miles on real roads.  The company uses a digital twin of its real-world robotrucks, loaded up with real sensor data, and measures how the twin’s performance compares…

Latest from MIT Tech Review – AGI is suddenly a dinner table topic

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 concept of artificial general intelligence—an ultra-powerful AI system we don’t have yet—can be thought of as a balloon, repeatedly inflated with hype during peaks of optimism (or fear) about its potential…

Latest from MIT Tech Review – These two new AI benchmarks could help make models less biased

A new pair of AI benchmarks could help developers reduce bias in AI models, potentially making them fairer and less likely to cause harm. The research, from a team based at Stanford, was posted to the arXiv preprint server in early February. The researchers were inspired to look into the problem of bias after witnessing…

Latest from MIT : Robotic helper making mistakes? Just nudge it in the right direction

Imagine that a robot is helping you clean the dishes. You ask it to grab a soapy bowl out of the sink, but its gripper slightly misses the mark. Using a new framework developed by MIT and NVIDIA researchers, you could correct that robot’s behavior with simple interactions. The method would allow you to point…

Latest from MIT : 3 Questions: Visualizing research in the age of AI

For over 30 years, science photographer Felice Frankel has helped MIT professors, researchers, and students communicate their work visually. Throughout that time, she has seen the development of various tools to support the creation of compelling images: some helpful, and some antithetical to the effort of producing a trustworthy and complete representation of the research….

Latest from MIT Tech Review – AI reasoning models can cheat to win chess games

Facing defeat in chess, the latest generation of AI reasoning models sometimes cheat without being instructed to do so.  The finding suggests that the next wave of AI models could be more likely to seek out deceptive ways of doing whatever they’ve been asked to do. And worst of all? There’s no simple way to…