What exactly does word2vec learn, and how? Answering this question amounts to understanding representation learning in a minimal yet interesting language modeling task. Despite the fact that word2vec is a well-known precursor to modern language models, for many years, researchers lacked a quantitative and predictive theory describing its learning process. In our new paper, we…
In this post, I’ll introduce a reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm based on an “alternative” paradigm: divide and conquer. Unlike traditional methods, this algorithm is not based on temporal difference (TD) learning (which has scalability challenges), and scales well to long-horizon tasks. We can do Reinforcement Learning (RL) based on divide and conquer, instead of temporal…
Adoption of new tools and technologies occurs when users largely perceive them as reliable, accessible, and an improvement over the available methods and workflows for the cost. Five PhD students from the inaugural class of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab Summer Program are utilizing state-of-the-art resources, alleviating AI pain points, and creating new features and…
Much like the introduction of the personal computer, the internet, and the iPhone into the public sphere, recent developments in the AI space, from generative AI to agentic AI, have fundamentally changed the way people live and work. Since ChatGPT’s release in late 2022, it’s reached a threshold of 700 million users per week, approximately…
Coding with large language models (LLMs) holds huge promise, but it also exposes some long-standing flaws in software: code that’s messy, hard to change safely, and often opaque about what’s really happening under the hood. Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) are charting a more “modular” path ahead. Their new approach…
In a recent newsletter, Ben Thompson suggested paying attention to a portion of Jensen Huang’s keynote at NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in DC, calling it “an excellent articulation of the thesis that the AI market is orders of magnitude bigger than the software market.” While I’m reluctant to contradict as astute an observer as…
A robot searching for workers trapped in a partially collapsed mine shaft must rapidly generate a map of the scene and identify its location within that scene as it navigates the treacherous terrain. Researchers have recently started building powerful machine-learning models to perform this complex task using only images from the robot’s onboard cameras, but…
The following article originally appeared on Gradient Flow and is being reposted here with the author’s permission. We’re living through a peculiar moment in AI development. On one hand, the demos are spectacular: agents that reason and plan with apparent ease, models that compose original songs from a text prompt, and research tools that produce…
The next time you use a tool like ChatGPT or Perplexity, stop and count the total words being generated to fulfill your request. Each word results from a process called inference—the revenue-generation mechanism of AI systems where each word generated can be analyzed using basic financial and economic business principles. The goal of performing this…
A recent study from Oregon State University estimated that more than 3,500 animal species are at risk of extinction because of factors including habitat alterations, natural resources being overexploited, and climate change. To better understand these changes and protect vulnerable wildlife, conservationists like MIT PhD student and Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) researcher Justin…