When I was eight years old, I watched a mountaineering documentary while waiting for the cricket match to start. I remember being incredibly frustrated watching these climbers inch their way up a massive rock face, stopping every few feet to hammer what looked like giant nails into the mountain. “Why don’t they just climb faster?”…
Generative AI has enabled the production of child sexual abuse images to skyrocket. Now the leading investigator of child exploitation in the US is experimenting with using AI to distinguish AI-generated images from material depicting real victims, according to a new government filing. The Department of Homeland Security’s Cyber Crimes Center, which investigates child exploitation…
Flock Safety, whose drones were once reserved for police departments, is now offering them for private-sector security, the company announced today, with potential customers including including businesses intent on curbing shoplifting. Companies in the US can now place Flock’s drone docking stations on their premises. If the company has a waiver from the Federal Aviation…
Machine-learning models can speed up the discovery of new materials by making predictions and suggesting experiments. But most models today only consider a few specific types of data or variables. Compare that with human scientists, who work in a collaborative environment and consider experimental results, the broader scientific literature, imaging and structural analysis, personal experience…
The productivity gains from AI tools are undeniable. Development teams are shipping faster, marketing campaigns are launching quicker, and deliverables are more polished than ever. But if you’re a technology leader watching these efficiency improvements, you might want to ask yourself a harder question: Are we building a more capable organization, or are we unintentionally…
When Kenneth Wehr started managing the Greenlandic-language version of Wikipedia four years ago, his first act was to delete almost everything. It had to go, he thought, if it had any chance of surviving. Wehr, who’s 26, isn’t from Greenland—he grew up in Germany—but he had become obsessed with the island, an autonomous Danish territory,…
Annotating regions of interest in medical images, a process known as segmentation, is often one of the first steps clinical researchers take when running a new study involving biomedical images. For instance, to determine how the size of the brain’s hippocampus changes as patients age, the scientist first outlines each hippocampus in a series of…
We often say AIs “understand” code, but they don’t truly understand your problem or your codebase in the sense that humans understand things. They’re mimicking patterns from text and code they’ve seen before, either built into their model or provided by you, aiming to produce something that looks right and is a plausible answer. It’s…
It’s a tale as old as time. Looking for help with her art project, she strikes up a conversation with her assistant. One thing leads to another, and suddenly she has a boyfriend she’s introducing to her friends and family. The twist? Her new companion is an AI chatbot. The first large-scale computational analysis of…
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. Millions of us use chatbots every day, even though we don’t really know how they work or how using them affects us. In…