The first clinical trial of a therapy bot that uses generative AI suggests it was as effective as human therapy for participants with depression, anxiety, or risk for developing eating disorders. Even so, it doesn’t give a go-ahead to the dozens of companies hyping such technologies while operating in a regulatory gray area. A team…
Taking out a loan to attend college is an investment in your future. But unlike in the United States, students in Pakistan don’t have easy access to college loans. Instead, most families must stomach higher interest rates for personal loans that can require collateral like land or homes. As a result, college is inaccessible for…
The AI firm Anthropic has developed a way to peer inside a large language model and watch what it does as it comes up with a response, revealing key new insights into how the technology works. The takeaway: LLMs are even stranger than we thought. The Anthropic team was surprised by some of the counterintuitive…
Learn more about updates for Google Search, Maps, Gemini and more that can help with summer travel.
Around 11 billion tons of goods, or about 1.5 tons per person worldwide, are transported by sea each year, representing about 90 percent of global trade by volume. Internationally, the merchant shipping fleet numbers around 110,000 vessels. These ships, and the ports that service them, are significant contributors to the local and global economy —…
A year or so ago, Xiao Li was seeing floods of Nvidia chip deals on WeChat. A real estate contractor turned data center project manager, he had pivoted to AI infrastructure in 2023, drawn by the promise of China’s AI craze. At that time, traders in his circle bragged about securing shipments of high-performing Nvidia…
Separating AI reality from hyped-up fiction isn’t always easy. That’s why we’ve created the AI Hype Index—a simple, at-a-glance summary of everything you need to know about the state of the industry. While AI models are certainly capable of creating interesting and sometimes entertaining material, their output isn’t necessarily useful. Google DeepMind is hoping that…
OpenAI has released a new image generator that’s designed less for typical surrealist AI art and more for highly controllable and practical creation of visuals—a sign that OpenAI thinks its tools are ready for use in fields like advertising and graphic design. The image generator, which is now part of the company’s GPT-4o model, was…
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. This week’s edition of The Algorithm is brought to you not by your usual host, James O’Donnell, but Eileen Guo, an investigative reporter at MIT Technology Review. A few weeks ago, when…
Training Diffusion Models with Reinforcement Learning We deployed 100 reinforcement learning (RL)-controlled cars into rush-hour highway traffic to smooth congestion and reduce fuel consumption for everyone. Our goal is to tackle “stop-and-go” waves, those frustrating slowdowns and speedups that usually have no clear cause but lead to congestion and significant energy waste. To train efficient…