Ben Vinson III, president of Howard University, made a compelling call for artificial intelligence to be “developed with wisdom,” as he delivered MIT’s annual Karl Taylor Compton Lecture on campus Monday. The broad-ranging talk posed a series of searching questions about our human ideals and practices, and was anchored in the view that, as Vinson…
Last Wednesday, Google made a somewhat surprising announcement. It launched a version of its AI model, Gemini, that can do things not just in the digital realm of chatbots and internet search but out here in the physical world, via robots. Gemini Robotics fuses the power of large language models with spatial reasoning, allowing you…
This story originally appeared in The Debrief with Mat Honan, a weekly newsletter about the biggest stories in tech from our editor in chief. Sign up here to get the next one in your inbox. I’ve been mulling over something that Will Heaven, our senior editor for AI, pointed out not too long ago: that all the big players…
In 2022, Randall Pietersen, a civil engineer in the U.S. Air Force, set out on a training mission to assess damage at an airfield runway, practicing “base recovery” protocol after a simulated attack. For hours, his team walked over the area in chemical protection gear, radioing in geocoordinates as they documented damage and looked for…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…