White House science advisor Arati Prabhakar expressed confidence in U.S. science and technology capacities during a talk on Wednesday about major issues the country must tackle. “Let me start with the purpose of science and technology and innovation, which is to open possibilities so that we can achieve our great aspirations,” said Prabhakar, who is…
Fields ranging from robotics to medicine to political science are attempting to train AI systems to make meaningful decisions of all kinds. For example, using an AI system to intelligently control traffic in a congested city could help motorists reach their destinations faster, while improving safety or sustainability. Unfortunately, teaching an AI system to make…
The Irish philosopher George Berkely, best known for his theory of immaterialism, once famously mused, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” What about AI-generated trees? They probably wouldn’t make a sound, but they will be critical nonetheless for applications such as…
OpenAI is once again lifting the lid (just a crack) on its safety-testing processes. Last month the company shared the results of an investigation that looked at how often ChatGPT produced a harmful gender or racial stereotype based on a user’s name. Now it has put out two papers describing how it stress-tests its powerful…
MIT Technology Review’s How To series helps you get things done. Since the start of the generative AI boom, artists have been worried about losing their livelihoods to AI tools. There have been plenty of examples of companies’ replacing human labor with computer programs. Most recently, Coca-Cola sparked controversy by creating a new Christmas ad…
Imagine sitting down with an AI model for a spoken two-hour interview. A friendly voice guides you through a conversation that ranges from your childhood, your formative memories, and your career to your thoughts on immigration policy. Not long after, a virtual replica of you is able to embody your values and preferences with stunning…
A crowd gathered at the MIT Media Lab in September for a concert by musician Jordan Rudess and two collaborators. One of them, violinist and vocalist Camilla Bäckman, has performed with Rudess before. The other — an artificial intelligence model informally dubbed the jam_bot, which Rudess developed with an MIT team over the preceding several…
For roboticists, one challenge towers above all others: generalization — the ability to create machines that can adapt to any environment or condition. Since the 1970s, the field has evolved from writing sophisticated programs to using deep learning, teaching robots to learn directly from human behavior. But a critical bottleneck remains: data quality. To improve,…
One popular term encountered in generative AI practice is retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Reasons for using RAG are clear: large language models (LLMs), which are effectively syntax engines, tend to “hallucinate” by inventing answers from pieces of their training data. The haphazard results may be entertaining, although not quite based in fact. RAG provides a way…
This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get it in your inbox first, sign up here. It can be tricky for reporters to get past certain doors, and the door to the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference is one that’s almost perpetually shut to the media. Thus, I was…