What if we’ve been thinking about artificial intelligence the wrong way? After all, AI is often discussed as something that could replicate human intelligence and replace human work. But there is an alternate future: one in which AI provides “machine usefulness” for human workers, augmenting but not usurping jobs, while helping to create productivity gains…
Posted by Zhengqi Li and Noah Snavely, Research Scientists, Google Research A mobile phone’s camera is a powerful tool for capturing everyday moments. However, capturing a dynamic scene using a single camera is fundamentally limited. For instance, if we wanted to adjust the camera motion or timing of a recorded video (e.g., to freeze time…
Ramnath Kumar, Pre-Doctoral Researcher, and Arun Sai Suggala, Research Scientist, Google Research Deep neural networks (DNNs) have become essential for solving a wide range of tasks, from standard supervised learning (image classification using ViT) to meta-learning. The most commonly-used paradigm for learning DNNs is empirical risk minimization (ERM), which aims to identify a network that…
A wearable exoskeleton can help runners increase their speed by encouraging them to take more steps, allowing them to cover short distances more quickly. While previous studies have focused on how wearable exoskeletons can help people reduce the energy they expend while running, the new study, published today in Science Robotics, examines how wearable robots…
In the mid-1980s, composer Tod Machover came across a copy of Philip K. Dick’s science fiction novel “VALIS” in a Parisian bookstore. Based on a mystical vision Dick called his “pink light experience,” “VALIS” was an acronym for “vast active living intelligence system.” The metaphysical novel would become the basis for Machover’s opera of the…
When Meta rebranded from Facebook two years ago, the word “metaverse” went mainstream. Even people outside the tech world wondered if we would soon start to socialize via virtual reality headsets. But, at least according to public opinion and the stock market, the metaverse proved itself to be pretty mid. Propelled by founder and CEO…
Generative AI, which is currently riding a crest of popular discourse, promises a world where the simple transforms into the complex — where a simple distribution evolves into intricate patterns of images, sounds, or text, rendering the artificial startlingly real. The realms of imagination no longer remain as mere abstractions, as researchers from MIT’s Computer…
Posted by Michał Januszewski, Research Scientist, Google Research The human brain is perhaps the most computationally complex machine in existence, consisting of networks of billions of cells. Researchers currently don’t understand the full picture of how glitches in its network machinery contribute to mental illnesses and other diseases, such as dementia. However, the emerging connectomics…
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Last Friday marked six months since the Future of Life Institute (FLI), a nonprofit focusing on existential risks surrounding artificial intelligence, shared an open letter signed by famous people such as Elon Musk,…
Computer vision systems are everywhere. They help classify and tag images on social media feeds, detect objects and faces in pictures and videos, and highlight relevant elements of an image. However, they are riddled with biases, and they’re less accurate when the images show Black or brown people and women. And there’s another problem: the…