This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology developments in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. Chinese ChatGPT-like bots are having a moment right now. As I reported last week, Baidu became the first Chinese tech company to roll out its large language model—called Ernie Bot—to the…
In the past year, kids, teachers, and parents have had a crash course in artificial intelligence, thanks to the wildly popular AI chatbot ChatGPT. In a knee-jerk reaction, some schools, such as the New York City public schools, banned the technology—only to cancel the ban months later. Now that many adults have caught up with…
AI language models are not humans, and yet we evaluate them as if they were, using tests like the bar exam or the United States Medical Licensing Examination. The models tend to do really well in these exams, probably because examples of such exams are abundant in the models’ training data. Yet, as my colleague…
As the impacts of climate change continue to grow, so does interest in fusion’s potential as a clean energy source. While fusion reactions have been studied in laboratories since the 1930s, there are still many critical questions scientists must answer to make fusion power a reality, and time is of the essence. As part of…
Posted by Stephan Rasp, Research Scientist, and Carla Bromberg, Program Lead, Google Research In 1950, weather forecasting started its digital revolution when researchers used the first programmable, general-purpose computer ENIAC to solve mathematical equations describing how weather evolves. In the more than 70 years since, continuous advancements in computing power and improvements to the model…
Posted by Vikas Bahirwani, Research Scientist, and Susan Xu, Software Engineer, Google Augmented Reality Automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology has made conversations more accessible with live captions in remote conferencing software, mobile applications, and head-worn displays. However, to maintain real-time responsiveness, live caption systems often display interim predictions that are updated as new utterances are…
MIT Professor Jonathan How’s research interests span the gamut of autonomous vehicles — from airplanes and spacecraft to unpiloted aerial vehicles (UAVs, or drones) and cars. He is particularly focused on the design and implementation of distributed robust planning algorithms to coordinate multiple autonomous vehicles capable of navigating in dynamic environments. For the past year…
On Wednesday, Baidu, one of China’s leading artificial intelligence companies, announced it would open up access to its ChatGPT-like large language model, Ernie Bot, to the general public. It’s been a long time coming. Launched in mid-March, Ernie Bot was the first Chinese ChatGPT rival. Since then, many Chinese tech companies have followed suit and…
Posted by Yujin Tang and Wenhao Yu, Research Scientists, Google Simple and effective interaction between human and quadrupedal robots paves the way towards creating intelligent and capable helper robots, forging a future where technology enhances our lives in ways beyond our imagination. Key to such human-robot interaction systems is enabling quadrupedal robots to respond to…
Google DeepMind has launched a new watermarking tool that labels whether images have been generated with AI. The tool, called SynthID, will initially be available only to users of Google’s AI image generator Imagen, which is hosted on Google Cloud’s machine learning platform Vertex. Users will be able to generate images using Imagen and then…