A few years ago, I had to make one of the biggest decisions of my life: continue as a professor at the University of Melbourne or move to another part of the world to help build a brand new university focused entirely on artificial intelligence. With the rapid development we have seen in AI over…
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. War is a catalyst for change, an expert in AI and warfare told me in 2022. At the time, the war in Ukraine had just started, and the military AI business was…
Generative AI could account for up to 5 million metric tons of e-waste by 2030, according to a new study. That’s a relatively small fraction of the current global total of over 60 million metric tons of e-waste each year. However, it’s still a significant part of a growing problem, experts warn. E-waste is the…
Palmer Luckey has, in some ways, come full circle. His first experience with virtual-reality headsets was as a teenage lab technician at a defense research center in Southern California, studying their potential to curb PTSD symptoms in veterans. He then built Oculus, sold it to Facebook for $2 billion, left Facebook after a highly public…
The US has a major problem with education inequality. Children from low-income families are less likely to receive high-quality education, partly because poorer districts struggle to retain experienced teachers. Artificial intelligence could help, by improving the one-on-one tutoring sometimes used to supplement class instruction in these schools. With help from an AI tool, tutors could…
In the classic cartoon “The Jetsons,” Rosie the robotic maid seamlessly switches from vacuuming the house to cooking dinner to taking out the trash. But in real life, training a general-purpose robot remains a major challenge. Typically, engineers collect data that are specific to a certain robot and task, which they use to train the…
“This new AI technology—it’s very interesting to learn how it works and understand it more,” says 10-year-old Luca, a young AI model maker. Luca is one of the first kids to try Little Language Models, a new application from Manuj and Shruti Dhariwal, two PhD researchers at MIT’s Media Lab, that helps children understand how…
Generative AI has the power to surprise in a way that few other technologies can. Sometimes that’s a very good thing; other times, not so good. In theory, as generative AI improves, this issue should become less important. However, in reality, as generative AI becomes more “human” it can begin to turn sinister and unsettling,…
The UK driverless-car startup Wayve is headed west. The firm’s cars learned to drive on the streets of London. But Wayve has announced that it will begin testing its tech in and around San Francisco as well. And that brings a new challenge: Its AI will need to switch from driving on the left to…
Google DeepMind has developed a tool for identifying AI-generated text and is making it available open source. The tool, called SynthID, is part of a larger family of watermarking tools for generative AI outputs. The company unveiled a watermark for images last year, and it has since rolled out one for AI-generated video. In May,…