This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Ever since last week’s dramatic events at OpenAI, the rumor mill has been in overdrive about why the company’s chief scientific officer Ilya Sutskever and its board decided to oust CEO Sam…
To teach an AI agent a new task, like how to open a kitchen cabinet, researchers often use reinforcement learning — a trial-and-error process where the agent is rewarded for taking actions that get it closer to the goal. In many instances, a human expert must carefully design a reward function, which is an incentive…
With tools such as ChatGPT, DALLE-2, and CodeStarter, generative AI has captured the public imagination in 2023. Unlike past technologies that have come and gone—think metaverse—this latest one looks set to stay. OpenAI’s chatbot, ChatGPT, is perhaps the best-known generative AI tool. It reached 100 million monthly active users in just two months after launch,…
Microbial sequence databases contain a wealth of information about enzymes and other molecules that could be adapted for biotechnology. But these databases have grown so large in recent years that they’ve become difficult to search efficiently for enzymes of interest. Now, scientists at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, the Broad Institute of…
Posted by Tapio Schneider, Visiting Researcher, and Yi-fan Chen, Engineering Lead, Google Research Today’s climate models successfully capture broad global warming trends. However, because of uncertainties about processes that are small in scale yet globally important, such as clouds and ocean turbulence, these models’ predictions of upcoming climate changes are not very accurate in detail….
Posted by Dave Hawkey, Software Engineer, Google Research Two years ago we announced Project Guideline, a collaboration between Google Research and Guiding Eyes for the Blind that enabled people with visual impairments (e.g., blindness and low-vision) to walk, jog, and run independently. Using only a Google Pixel phone and headphones, Project Guideline leverages on-device machine…
This semester, students and postdocs across MIT were invited to submit ideas for the first-ever MIT Ignite: Generative AI Entrepreneurship Competition. Over 100 teams submitted proposals for startups that utilize generative artificial intelligence technologies to develop solutions across a diverse range of disciplines including human health, climate change, education, and workforce dynamics. On Oct. 30,…
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, are you okay, babe? This past weekend has been a fever dream in the AI world. The board of OpenAI, the world’s hottest AI company, shocked everyone by firing CEO…
Data is the new soil, and in this fertile new ground, MIT researchers are planting more than just pixels. By using synthetic images to train machine learning models, a team of scientists recently surpassed results obtained from traditional “real-image” training methods. At the core of the approach is a system called StableRep, which doesn’t just…
Inside a co-working space in the Rosebank neighborhood of Johannesburg, Jade Abbott popped open a tab on her computer and prompted ChatGPT to count from 1 to 10 in isiZulu, a language spoken by more than 10 million people in her native South Africa. The results were “mixed and hilarious,” says Abbott, a computer scientist…