This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. Last week’s release of GPT-4o, a new AI “omnimodel” that you can interact with using voice, text, or video, was supposed to be a big moment for OpenAI. But just days later,…
Since its launch in 2022, the MIT Morningside Academy for Design (MAD) has supported MIT graduate students with a fellowship, allowing recipients to pursue design research and projects while creating community. Pulling from different corners of design, they explore solutions in fields such as sustainability, health, architecture, urban planning, engineering, and social justice. On May…
Artificial intelligence has brought a big boost in productivity—to the criminal underworld. Generative AI provides a new, powerful tool kit that allows malicious actors to work far more efficiently and internationally than ever before, says Vincenzo Ciancaglini, a senior threat researcher at the security company Trend Micro. Most criminals are “not living in some dark…
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. I’m excited to spend this week in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I’m visiting the mothership for MIT Technology Review’s annual flagship AI conference, EmTech Digital, on May 22-23. Between the world leaders gathering in Seoul…
Humans are complicated beings. The ways we communicate are multilayered, and psychologists have devised many kinds of tests to measure our ability to infer meaning and understanding from interactions with each other. AI models are getting better at these tests. New research published today in Nature Human Behavior found that some large language models (LLMs)…
Soon after OpenAI released GPT-4o on Monday, May 13, some Chinese speakers started to notice something seemed off about this newest version of the chatbot: the tokens it uses to parse text were full of spam and porn phrases. On May 14, Tianle Cai, a PhD student at Princeton University studying inference efficiency in large…
When water freezes, it transitions from a liquid phase to a solid phase, resulting in a drastic change in properties like density and volume. Phase transitions in water are so common most of us probably don’t even think about them, but phase transitions in novel materials or complex physical systems are an important area of…
This week, Google and OpenAI both announced they’ve built supercharged AI assistants: tools that can converse with you in real time and recover when you interrupt them, analyze your surroundings via live video, and translate conversations on the fly. OpenAI struck first on Monday, when it debuted its new flagship model GPT-4o. The live demonstration…
Google is set to introduce a new system called Astra later this year and promises that it will be the most powerful, advanced type of AI assistant it’s ever launched. The current generation of AI assistants, such as ChatGPT, can retrieve information and offer answers, but that is about it. But this year, Google is…
Imagine you and a friend are playing a game where your goal is to communicate secret messages to each other using only cryptic sentences. Your friend’s job is to guess the secret message behind your sentences. Sometimes, you give clues directly, and other times, your friend has to guess the message by asking yes-or-no questions…