Kevlin Henney and I recently discussed whether automated code generation, using some future version of GitHub Copilot or the like, could ever replace higher-level languages. Specifically, could ChatGPT N (for large N) quit the game of generating code in a high-level language like Python, and produce executable machine code directly, like compilers do today? It’s…
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Happy new year! I hope you had a relaxing break. I spent it up in the Arctic Circle skiing, going to the sauna, and playing card games with my family by…
Posted by Ayça Çakmakli, UX Lead, Google Research, Responsible AI and Human Centered Technology Team Google’s Responsible AI User Experience (Responsible AI UX) team is a product-minded team embedded within Google Research. This unique positioning requires us to apply responsible AI development practices to our user-centered user experience (UX) design process. In this post, we…
Your daily to-do list is likely pretty straightforward: wash the dishes, buy groceries, and other minutiae. It’s unlikely you wrote out “pick up the first dirty dish,” or “wash that plate with a sponge,” because each of these miniature steps within the chore feels intuitive. While we can routinely complete each step without much thought,…
In fields such as physics and engineering, partial differential equations (PDEs) are used to model complex physical processes to generate insight into how some of the most complicated physical and natural systems in the world function. To solve these difficult equations, researchers use high-fidelity numerical solvers, which can be very time-consuming and computationally expensive to…
WHO Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI WHEN Now When OpenAI launched a free web app called ChatGPT in November 2022, nobody knew what was coming. But that low-key release changed everything. By January, ChatGPT had become the fastest-growing web app ever, offering anyone with a browser access to one of the most powerful neural networks ever…
This time last year we did something reckless. In an industry where nothing stands still, we had a go at predicting the future. How did we do? Our four big bets for 2023 were that the next big thing in chatbots would be multimodal (check: the most powerful large language models out there, OpenAI’s GPT-4…
Explaining the behavior of trained neural networks remains a compelling puzzle, especially as these models grow in size and sophistication. Like other scientific challenges throughout history, reverse-engineering how artificial intelligence systems work requires a substantial amount of experimentation: making hypotheses, intervening on behavior, and even dissecting large networks to examine individual neurons. To date, most…
With help from an artificial language network, MIT neuroscientists have discovered what kind of sentences are most likely to fire up the brain’s key language processing centers. The new study reveals that sentences that are more complex, either because of unusual grammar or unexpected meaning, generate stronger responses in these language processing centers. Sentences that…
Few technologies have shown as much potential to shape our future as artificial intelligence. Specialists in fields ranging from medicine to microfinance to the military are evaluating AI tools, exploring how these might transform their work and worlds. For creative professionals, AI poses a unique set of challenges and opportunities — particularly generative AI, the…