This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. The start of a new year, and maybe especially this one, feels like a good time for a gut check: How optimistic are you feeling about the future of technology? Our…
We all know what it means, colloquially, to google something. You pop a few relevant words in a search box and in return get a list of blue links to the most relevant results. Maybe some quick explanations up top. Maybe some maps or sports scores or a video. But fundamentally, it’s just fetching information…
WHO Baidu, Pony AI, Waymo, Wayve, Zoox WHEN Now If you live in certain cities in America or China, you’ve probably spotted driverless cars dropping off passengers. Perhaps you’ve even ridden in one yourself. That’s a radical change from even three years ago, when these services were still learning the rules of the road. And…
WHO Agility, Amazon, Covariant, Robust, Toyota Research Institute WHEN Now Generative AI is causing a paradigm shift in how robots are trained. It’s now clear how we might finally build the sort of truly capable robots that have for decades remained the stuff of science fiction. Robotics researchers are no strangers to artificial intelligence—it has…
WHO Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Perplexity WHEN Now Google’s introduction of AI Overviews, powered by its Gemini language model, will alter how billions of people search the internet. And generative search may be the first step toward an AI agent that handles any question you have or task you need done. Rather than returning…
WHO Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI WHEN Now Make no mistake: Size matters in the AI world. When OpenAI launched GPT-3 back in 2020, it was the largest language model ever built. The firm showed that supersizing this type of model was enough to send performance through the roof. That…
By adapting artificial intelligence models known as large language models, researchers have made great progress in their ability to predict a protein’s structure from its sequence. However, this approach hasn’t been as successful for antibodies, in part because of the hypervariability seen in this type of protein. To overcome that limitation, MIT researchers have developed…
Most people take boiling water for granted. For Associate Professor Matteo Bucci, uncovering the physics behind boiling has been a decade-long journey filled with unexpected challenges and new insights. The seemingly simple phenomenon is extremely hard to study in complex systems like nuclear reactors, and yet it sits at the core of a wide range…
The past 12 months have been undeniably busy for those working in AI. There have been more successful product launches than we can count, and even Nobel Prizes. But it hasn’t always been smooth sailing. AI is an unpredictable technology, and the increasing availability of generative models has led people to test their limits in…
Separating AI reality from hyped-up fiction isn’t always easy. That’s why we’ve created the AI Hype Index—a simple, at-a-glance summary of everything you need to know about the state of the industry. More than 70 countries went to the polls in 2024. The good news is that this year of global elections turned out to…