Like just about everyone, we were impressed by the ability of NotebookLM to generate podcasts: Two virtual people holding a discussion. You can give it some links, and it will generate a podcast based on the links. The podcasts were interesting and engaging. But they also had some limitations. The problem with NotebookLM is that,…
Five MIT faculty members and two additional alumni were recently named to the 2024 cohort of AI2050 Fellows. The honor is announced annually by Schmidt Futures, Eric and Wendy Schmidt’s philanthropic initiative that aims to accelerate scientific innovation. Conceived and co-chaired by Eric Schmidt and James Manyika, AI2050 is a philanthropic initiative aimed at helping…
It’s no secret that the current AI boom is using up immense amounts of energy. Now we have a better idea of how much. A new paper, from a team at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, examined 2,132 data centers operating in the United States (78% of all facilities in the country)….
One might argue that one of the primary duties of a physician is to constantly evaluate and re-evaluate the odds: What are the chances of a medical procedure’s success? Is the patient at risk of developing severe symptoms? When should the patient return for more testing? Amidst these critical deliberations, the rise of artificial intelligence…
If someone advises you to “know your limits,” they’re likely suggesting you do things like exercise in moderation. To a robot, though, the motto represents learning constraints, or limitations of a specific task within the machine’s environment, to do chores safely and correctly. For instance, imagine asking a robot to clean your kitchen when it…
Google DeepMind has announced an impressive grab bag of new products and prototypes that may just let it seize back its lead in the race to turn generative artificial intelligence into a mass-market concern. Top billing goes to Gemini 2.0—the latest iteration of Google DeepMind’s family of multimodal large language models, now redesigned around the…
Like many others, I recently fled social media platform X for Bluesky. In the process, I started following many of the people I followed on X. On Thanksgiving, I was delighted to see a private message from a fellow AI reporter, Will Knight from Wired. Or at least that’s who I thought I was talking…
Machine-learning models can fail when they try to make predictions for individuals who were underrepresented in the datasets they were trained on. For instance, a model that predicts the best treatment option for someone with a chronic disease may be trained using a dataset that contains mostly male patients. That model might make incorrect predictions…
Large language models (LLMs) that drive generative artificial intelligence apps, such as ChatGPT, have been proliferating at lightning speed and have improved to the point that it is often impossible to distinguish between something written through generative AI and human-composed text. However, these models can also sometimes generate false statements or display a political bias….
Alibaba’s latest model, QwQ-32B-Preview, has gained some impressive reviews for its reasoning abilities. Like OpenAI’s GPT-4 o1,1 its training has emphasized reasoning rather than just reproducing language. That seemed like something worth testing out—or at least playing around with—so when I heard that it very quickly became available in Ollama and wasn’t too large to…