The German philosopher Fredrich Nietzsche once said that “invisible threads are the strongest ties.” One could think of “invisible threads” as tying together related objects, like the homes on a delivery driver’s route, or more nebulous entities, such as transactions in a financial network or users in a social network. Computer scientist Julian Shun studies…
“All right, so today we are going to dive deep into some cutting-edge tech,” a chatty American male voice says. But this voice does not belong to a human. It belongs to Google’s new AI podcasting tool, called Audio Overview, which has become a surprise viral hit. The podcasting feature was launched in mid-September as…
Generative AI models can produce images in response to prompts within seconds, and they’ve recently been used for everything from highlighting their own inherent bias to preserving precious memories. Now, researchers from Stephen James’s Robot Learning Lab in London are using image-generating AI models for a new purpose: creating training data for robots. They’ve developed…
Imagine you’re tasked with sending a team of football players onto a field to assess the condition of the grass (a likely task for them, of course). If you pick their positions randomly, they might cluster together in some areas while completely neglecting others. But if you give them a strategy, like spreading out uniformly…
In the United States and around the world, democracy is under threat. Anti-democratic attitudes have become more prevalent, partisan polarization is growing, misinformation is omnipresent, and politicians and citizens sometimes question the integrity of elections. With this backdrop, the MIT Department of Political Science is launching an effort to establish a Strengthening Democracy Initiative. In…
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. In AI research, everyone seems to think that bigger is better. The idea is that more data, more computing power, and more parameters will lead to models that are more powerful….
This article is from The Debrief with Mat Honan, MIT Technology Review’s weekly newsletter from its editor in chief. To receive it every Friday, sign up here. In case you missed the memo, we are barreling toward the next big consumer device category: smart glasses. At its developer conference this week, Meta (née Facebook) introduced a positively mind-blowing…
Have you ever wanted to travel through time to see what your future self might be like? Now, thanks to the power of generative AI, you can. Researchers from MIT and elsewhere created a system that enables users to have an online, text-based conversation with an AI-generated simulation of their potential future self. Dubbed Future You,…
In 1994, Florida jewelry designer Diana Duyser discovered what she believed to be the Virgin Mary’s image in a grilled cheese sandwich, which she preserved and later auctioned for $28,000. But how much do we really understand about pareidolia, the phenomenon of seeing faces and patterns in objects when they aren’t really there? A new study…
Imagine having to straighten up a messy kitchen, starting with a counter littered with sauce packets. If your goal is to wipe the counter clean, you might sweep up the packets as a group. If, however, you wanted to first pick out the mustard packets before throwing the rest away, you would sort more discriminately,…