On May 31, the U.S. Department of Defense’s chief technology officer, Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Heidi Shyu, presented Eric Evans with the Department of Defense (DoD) Medal for Distinguished Public Service. This award is the highest honor given by the secretary of defense to private citizens for their significant service to…
First, a confession. I only got into playing video games a little over a year ago (I know, I know). A Christmas gift of an Xbox Series S “for the kids” dragged me—pretty easily, it turns out—into the world of late-night gaming sessions. I was immediately attracted to open-world games, in which you’re free to…
When the Takeda Pharmaceutical Co. and the MIT School of Engineering launched their collaboration focused on artificial intelligence in health care and drug development in February 2020, society was on the cusp of a globe-altering pandemic and AI was far from the buzzword it is today. As the program concludes, the world looks very different. AI has…
Meta has created a system that can embed hidden signals, known as watermarks, in AI-generated audio clips, which could help in detecting AI-generated content online. The tool, called AudioSeal, is the first that can pinpoint which bits of audio in, for example, a full hourlong podcast might have been generated by AI. It could help…
Last month, TheNew York Times claimed that tech giants OpenAI and Google have waded into a copyright gray area by transcribing the vast volume of YouTube videos and using that text as additional training data for their AI models despite terms of service that prohibit such efforts and copyright law that the Times argues places…
We’re planning a live virtual event later this year, and we want to hear from you. Are you using a powerful AI technology that seems like everyone ought to be using? Here’s your opportunity to show the world! AI is too often seen as a “first world” enterprise of, by, and for the wealthy. We’re going…
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Knock, knock. Who’s there? An AI with generic jokes. Researchers from Google DeepMind asked 20 professional comedians to use popular AI language models to write jokes and comedy performances. Their results…
MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here. The World Health Organization’s new chatbot launched on April 2 with the best of intentions. A fresh-faced virtual avatar backed by GPT-3.5, SARAH (Smart AI Resource Assistant…
Imagine driving through a tunnel in an autonomous vehicle, but unbeknownst to you, a crash has stopped traffic up ahead. Normally, you’d need to rely on the car in front of you to know you should start braking. But what if your vehicle could see around the car ahead and apply the brakes even sooner?…
You’ve likely heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but can a large language model (LLM) get the picture if it’s never seen images before? As it turns out, language models that are trained purely on text have a solid understanding of the visual world. They can write image-rendering code to generate complex…