Posted by Matthew Streeter, Software Engineer, Google Research Derivatives play a central role in optimization and machine learning. By locally approximating a training loss, derivatives guide an optimizer toward lower values of the loss. Automatic differentiation frameworks such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, and JAX are an essential part of modern machine learning, making it feasible to…
The release of ChatGPT has sent shock waves through the halls of higher education. Universities have rushed to release guidelines on how it can be used in the classroom. Professors have taken to social media to share a spectrum of AI policies. And students—whether or not they’ll admit it—have cautiously experimented with the idea of allowing…
Posted by Sergey Levine, Research Scientist, and Alexander Herzog, Staff Research Software Engineer, Google Research, Brain Team Reinforcement learning (RL) can enable robots to learn complex behaviors through trial-and-error interaction, getting better and better over time. Several of our prior works explored how RL can enable intricate robotic skills, such as robotic grasping, multi-task learning,…
The emergence of generative artificial intelligence has ignited a deep philosophical exploration into the nature of consciousness, creativity, and authorship. As we bear witness to new advances in the field, it’s increasingly apparent that these synthetic agents possess a remarkable capacity to create, iterate, and challenge our traditional notions of intelligence. But what does it…
Posted by Sherry Yang, Research Scientist, and Yilun Du, Student Researcher, Google Research, Brain Team Building models that solve a diverse set of tasks has become a dominant paradigm in the domains of vision and language. In natural language processing, large pre-trained models, such as PaLM, GPT-3 and Gopher, have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot learning of…
Brian Nord first fell in love with physics when he was a teenager growing up in Wisconsin. His high school physics program wasn’t exceptional, and he sometimes struggled to keep up with class material, but those difficulties did nothing to dampen his interest in the subject. In addition to the main curriculum, students were encouraged…
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. This year millions of people have tried—and been wowed by— artificial-intelligence systems. That’s in no small part thanks to OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT. When it launched last November, the chatbot became an instant…
Posted by Sara Ahadi, Research Fellow, Applied Science, and Andrew Carroll, Product Lead, Genomics Aging is a process that is characterized by physiological and molecular changes that increase an individual’s risk of developing diseases and eventually dying. Being able to measure and estimate the biological signatures of aging can help researchers identify preventive measures to…
It’s an evening in 1531, in the city of Venice. In a printer’s workshop, an apprentice labors over the layout of a page that’s destined for an astronomy textbook—a dense line of type and a woodblock illustration of a cherubic head observing shapes moving through the cosmos, representing a lunar eclipse. Like all aspects of…
Posted by Thomas Lew, Research Intern, and Montserrat Gonzalez Arenas, Research Engineer, Google Research, Brain Team Over the past several years, the capabilities of robotic systems have improved dramatically. As the technology continues to improve and robotic agents are more routinely deployed in real-world environments, their capacity to assist in day-to-day activities will take on…