This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. It’s been another big week in AI. Meta updated its powerful new Llama model, which it’s handing out for free, and OpenAI said it is going to trial an AI-powered online…
Since the beginning of the generative AI boom, content creators have argued that their work has been scraped into AI models without their consent. But until now, it has been difficult to know whether specific text has actually been used in a training data set. Now they have a new way to prove it: “copyright…
AI models can easily generate essays and other types of text. However, they’re nowhere near as good at solving math problems, which tend to involve logical reasoning—something that’s beyond the capabilities of most current AI systems. But that may finally be changing. Google DeepMind says it has trained two specialized AI systems to solve complex…
AI models work by training on huge swaths of data from the internet. But as AI is increasingly being used to pump out web pages filled with junk content, that process is in danger of being undermined. New research published in Nature shows that the quality of the model’s output gradually degrades when AI trains…
Organizations are increasingly utilizing machine-learning models to allocate scarce resources or opportunities. For instance, such models can help companies screen resumes to choose job interview candidates or aid hospitals in ranking kidney transplant patients based on their likelihood of survival. When deploying a model, users typically strive to ensure its predictions are fair by reducing…
As artificial intelligence models become increasingly prevalent and are integrated into diverse sectors like health care, finance, education, transportation, and entertainment, understanding how they work under the hood is critical. Interpreting the mechanisms underlying AI models enables us to audit them for safety and biases, with the potential to deepen our understanding of the science…
As the name suggests, most electronic devices today work through the movement of electrons. But materials that can efficiently conduct protons — the nucleus of the hydrogen atom — could be key to a number of important technologies for combating global climate change. Most proton-conducting inorganic materials available now require undesirably high temperatures to achieve…
Like almost any question about AI, “How does AI impact software architecture?” has two sides to it: how AI changes the practice of software architecture and how AI changes the things we architect. These questions are coupled; one can’t really be discussed without the other. But to jump to the conclusion, we can say that…
MIT Technology Review’s How To series helps you get things done. Hundreds of Chinese large language models have been released since the government started permitting AI companies to open up their models for the general public to play around with in the summer of 2023. For users in the West, finding these Chinese models and trying them…
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Yesterday, on July 21, President Joe Biden announced he is stepping down from the race against Donald Trump in the US presidential election. But AI nerds may remember that exactly a…