Amid a huge amount of hype around generative AI, a new study from researchers at MIT sheds light on the technology’s impact on work, finding that it increased productivity for workers assigned tasks like writing cover letters, delicate emails, and cost-benefit analyses. The tasks in the study weren’t quite replicas of real work: They didn’t…
AI systems are increasingly everywhere and are becoming more powerful almost by the day. But even as they become ever more ubiquitous and do more, how can we know if a machine is truly “intelligent”? For decades the Turing test defined this question. First proposed in 1950 by the computer scientist Alan Turing, it tried…
Imagine that a team of scientists has developed a machine-learning model that can predict whether a patient has cancer from lung scan images. They want to share this model with hospitals around the world so clinicians can start using it in diagnosis. But there’s a problem. To teach their model how to predict cancer, they…
Posted by Jerry Wei, Student Researcher, and Denny Zhou, Principal Scientist, Google Research A key feature of human intelligence is that humans can learn to perform new tasks by reasoning using only a few examples. Scaling up language models has unlocked a range of new applications and paradigms in machine learning, including the ability to…
Data, and more specifically using data, is not a new concept, but it remains an elusive one. It comes with terms like “the internet of things” (IoT) and “the cloud,” and no matter how often those are explained, smart people can still be confused. And then there’s the amount of information available and the speed…
Many scholars, analysts, and other observers have suggested that resistance to innovation is an Achilles’ heel of authoritarian regimes. Such governments can fail to keep up with technological changes that help their opponents; they may also, by stifling rights, inhibit innovative economic activity and weaken the long-term condition of the country. But a new study…
Biology is a wondrous yet delicate tapestry. At the heart is DNA, the master weaver that encodes proteins, responsible for orchestrating the many biological functions that sustain life within the human body. However, our body is akin to a finely tuned instrument, susceptible to losing its harmony. After all, we’re faced with an ever-changing and…
Bill Gates has joined the chorus of big names in tech who have weighed in on the question of risk around artificial intelligence. The TL;DR? He’s not too worried, we’ve been here before. The optimism is refreshing after weeks of doomsaying—but it comes with few fresh ideas. The billionaire business magnate and philanthropist made his…
Posted by Amir Yazdanbakhsh, Research Scientist, and Vijay Janapa Reddi, Visiting Researcher, Google Research Computer Architecture research has a long history of developing simulators and tools to evaluate and shape the design of computer systems. For example, the SimpleScalar simulator was introduced in the late 1990s and allowed researchers to explore various microarchitectural ideas. Computer…
There’s a lot of angst about software developers “losing their jobs” to AI, being replaced by a more intelligent version of ChatGPT, GitHub’s Copilot, Google’s Codey, or something similar. Matt Welsh has been talking and writing about the end of programming as such. He’s asking whether large language models eliminate programming as we know it,…