Sample language model responses to different varieties of English and native speaker reactions. ChatGPT does amazingly well at communicating with people in English. But whose English? Only 15% of ChatGPT users are from the US, where Standard American English is the default. But the model is also commonly used in countries and communities where people…
It’s tricky to get robots to do things in environments they’ve never seen before. Typically, researchers need to train them on new data for every new place they encounter, which can become very time-consuming and expensive. Now, researchers have developed a series of AI models that teach robots to complete basic tasks in new surroundings…
For more than 100 years, scientists have been using X-ray crystallography to determine the structure of crystalline materials such as metals, rocks, and ceramics. This technique works best when the crystal is intact, but in many cases, scientists have only a powdered version of the material, which contains random fragments of the crystal. This makes…
Apple co-founder Steve Jobs described the computer as a bicycle for the mind. What the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship just launched has a bit more horsepower. “Maybe it’s not a Ferrari yet, but we have a car,” says Bill Aulet, the center’s managing director. The vehicle: the MIT Entrepreneurship JetPack, a generative artificial intelligence tool trained on…
A new study from researchers at MIT and Penn State University reveals that if large language models were to be used in home surveillance, they could recommend calling the police even when surveillance videos show no criminal activity. In addition, the models the researchers studied were inconsistent in which videos they flagged for police intervention….
AI-generated falsehoods and deepfakes seem to have had no effect on election results in the UK, France, and the European Parliament this year, according to new research. Since the beginning of the generative-AI boom, there has been widespread fear that AI tools could boost bad actors’ ability to spread fake content with the potential to…
AI is everywhere—we’re in a middle of a technology shift that’s as big (and possibly bigger) than the arrival of the web in the 1990s. Even though ChatGPT appeared almost two years ago, we still feel unprepared: we read that AI will change every job and we don’t know what that means or how to…
This story is from The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get it in your inbox first, sign up here. Welcome back to The Algorithm! This week we’re going to talk about OpenAI’s impressive new reasoning model, called o1. I want to illustrate why it’s such a big deal with an example from my wedding…
Ever been asked a question you only knew part of the answer to? To give a more informed response, your best move would be to phone a friend with more knowledge on the subject. This collaborative process can also help large language models (LLMs) improve their accuracy. Still, it’s been difficult to teach LLMs to…
In the past couple of years, regulators have been caught off guard again and again as tech companies compete to launch ever more advanced AI models. It’s only a matter of time before labs release another round of models that pose new regulatory challenges. We’re likely just weeks away, for example, from OpenAI’s release of…