Artificial Intelligence

Posted by Urs Köster, Software Engineer, Google Research Time series problems are ubiquitous, from forecasting weather and traffic patterns to understanding economic trends. Bayesian approaches start with an assumption about the data’s patterns (prior probability), collecting evidence (e.g., new time series data), and continuously updating that assumption to form a posterior probability distribution. Traditional Bayesian…

Last summer, MIT President Sally Kornbluth and Provost Cynthia Barnhart issued a call for papers to “articulate effective roadmaps, policy recommendations, and calls for action across the broad domain of generative AI.” The response to the call far exceeded expectations with 75 proposals submitted. Of those, 27 proposals were selected for seed funding. In light…

In the last month, a handful of filmmakers have taken Sora for a test drive. The results, which OpenAI published this week, are amazing. The short films are a big jump up even from the cherrypicked demo videos that OpenAI used to tease its new generative model just six weeks ago. Here’s how three of…

When OpenAI revealed its new generative video model, Sora, last month, it invited a handful of filmmakers to try it out. This week the company published the results: seven surreal short films that leave no doubt that the future of generative video is coming fast.  The first batch of models that could turn text into…

This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. In 2019, MIT Technology Review covered a report that shined a light on how fast China’s AI talent pool was growing. Its main finding was pretty interesting: the number of elite AI…

Crafting a good-tasting beer is a difficult task. Big breweries select hundreds of trained tasters from among their employees to test their new products. But running such sensory tasting panels is expensive, and perceptions of what tastes good can be highly subjective.   What if artificial intelligence could help lighten the load? New AI models can…

To assess a community’s risk of extreme weather, policymakers rely first on global climate models that can be run decades, and even centuries, forward in time, but only at a coarse resolution. These models might be used to gauge, for instance, future climate conditions for the northeastern U.S., but not specifically for Boston. To estimate…

TL;DR LLMs and other GenAI models can reproduce significant chunks of training data.Specific prompts seem to “unlock” training data.We have many current and future copyright challenges: training may not infringe copyright, but legal doesn’t mean legitimate—we consider the analogy of MegaFace where surveillance models have been trained on photos of minors, for example, without informed…

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 UK is home to AI powerhouse Google DeepMind, a slew of exciting AI startups, and some of the world’s best universities. It’s also where I live, along with quite a…

Since the beginning of the generative AI boom, there has been a fight over how large AI models are trained. In one camp sit tech companies such as OpenAI that have claimed it is “impossible” to train AI without hoovering the internet of copyrighted data. And in the other camp are artists who argue that…