Author: zppiot
Hinton shares the award with fellow computer scientist John Hopfield, who invented a type of pattern-matching neural network that could store and reconstruct data. Hinton built on this technology, known as a Hopfield network, to develop backpropagation, an algorithm that lets neural networks learn. Hopfield and Hinton borrowed methods from physics, especially statistical techniques, to develop their approaches. In the words of the Nobel Prize committee, the pair are recognized “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks.” But since May 2023, when MIT Technology Review helped break the news that Hinton was now scared…
Exhibit A: Google’s NotebookLM. NotebookLM is a research tool the company launched with little fanfare a year ago. A few weeks ago, Google added an AI podcasting tool called Audio Overview to NotebookLM, which allows users to create podcasts about anything. Add a link to, for example, your LinkedIn profile, and the AI podcast hosts will boost your ego for nine minutes. The feature has become a surprise viral hit. I wrote about all the weird and amazing ways people are using it here. To give you a taste, I created a podcast of our 125th-anniversary magazine issue. The AI does a…
AI’s power density requirements similarly necessitate a new set of electricity infrastructure enhancements—like advanced conductors for transmission lines that can move up to 10 times as much power through much smaller areas, cooling infrastructure that can address the heat of vast quantities of energy-hungry chips humming alongside one another, and next-generation transformers that enable the efficient use of higher-voltage power. These technologies offer significant economic benefits to AI data centers in the form of increased access to power and reduced latency, and they will enable the rapid expansion of our 20th-century electricity grid to serve 21st-century needs. Moreover, the convergence…
Glocks, military-style rifles and “ghost guns” have all been advertised for sale on easily accessible sites like Facebook and Instagram. Each ad appears to be in direct violation of Meta’s own policies, raising questions about the company’s ability to effectively moderate content. Some of the ads go even further, potentially violating local and federal laws. Meta has banned ads for the sale of firearms since 2016. The company’s policy simply states: “Ads must not promote the sale or use of weapons, ammunition or explosives. This includes ads for weapon modification accessories.” But more than 230 of these ads ran on Meta’s platforms in…
The three-day dockworker strike that crippled East and Gulf Coast ports put a spotlight on one of America’s most important jobs: loading and unloading the billions of products — from food to cars — that keep the U.S. economy humming.Although the work stoppage has ended for now, the labor dispute reflects how robots, artificial intelligence and other potent technologies are changing the nature of operations in the nation’s supply chains and in other industries. “We’re really at a moment here where we’re taking about the future of work and what that looks like in America and around the world,” John Samuel,…
Since the heyday of radio, records, cassette tapes, and MP3 players, the branding of sound has evolved from broad genres like rock and hip-hop to “paranormal dark cabaret afternoon” and “synth space,” and streaming has become the default. Meanwhile, the ritual of discovering something new is now neatly packaged in a 30-song playlist, refreshed weekly. The only rule in music streaming, as in any other industry these days, is personalization. But what we’ve gained in convenience, we’ve lost in curiosity. Sure, our unlimited access lets us listen to Swedish tropical house or New Jersey hardcore, but this abundance of choice…
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. People are using Google study software to make AI podcasts—and they’re weird and amazing Google’s new AI podcasting tool, called Audio Overview, has become a surprise viral hit.The podcasting feature was launched in mid-September as part of NotebookLM, a year-old AI-powered research assistant. NotebookLM, which is powered by Google’s Gemini 1.5 model, allows people to upload content such as links, videos, PDFs, and text. They can then ask the system questions about the content, and it offers short…
But some proponents of mental privacy aren’t satisfied that the law does enough to protect neural data. “While it introduces important safeguards, significant ambiguities leave room for loopholes that could undermine privacy protections, especially regarding inferences from neural data,” Marcello Ienca, an ethicist at the Technical University of Munich, posted on X. One such ambiguity concerns the meaning of “nonneural information,” according to Nita Farahany, a futurist and legal ethicist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. “The bill’s language suggests that raw data [collected from a person’s brain] may be protected, but inferences or conclusions—where privacy risks are most…
The tool generates a podcast called Deep Dive, which features a male and a female voice discussing whatever you uploaded. The voices are breathtakingly realistic—the episodes are laced with little human-sounding phrases like “Man” and “Wow” and “Oh right” and “Hold on, let me get this right.” The “hosts” even interrupt each other. To test it out, I copied every story from MIT Technology Review’s 125th-anniversary issue into NotebookLM and made the system generate a 10-minute podcast with the results. The system picked a couple of stories to focus on, and the AI hosts did a great job at conveying…
Generative AI models can produce images in response to prompts within seconds, and they’ve recently been used for everything from highlighting their own inherent bias to preserving precious memories. Now, researchers from Stephen James’s Robot Learning Lab in London are using image-generating AI models for a new purpose: creating training data for robots. They’ve developed a new system, called Genima, that fine-tunes the image-generating AI model Stable Diffusion to draw robots’ movements, helping guide them both in simulations and in the real world. Genima could make it easier to train different types of robots to complete tasks—machines ranging from mechanical…
Our goal is to spotlight businesses we believe could help make a dent in climate change. This year’s list includes companies from a wide range of industries, headquartered on five continents. If you haven’t checked it out yet, I highly recommend giving it a look. Each company has a profile in which we’ve outlined why it made the list, what sort of impact the business might have, and what challenges it’s likely to face. In the meantime, I wanted to share a few reflections on this year’s list as a whole. Because this slate of companies exemplifies a few key…
The system could make it easier to train different types of robots to complete tasks—machines ranging from mechanical arms to humanoid robots and driverless cars. It could also help make AI web agents, a next generation of AI tools that can carry out complex tasks with little supervision, better at scrolling and clicking, says Mohit Shridhar, a research scientist specializing in robotic manipulation, who worked on the project. “You can use image-generation systems to do almost all the things that you can do in robotics,” he says. “We wanted to see if we could take all these amazing things that…
Google goes all in on AI at developer event Google goes all in on AI at annual developer conference 04:47 Gmail users are getting an upgrade to their inboxes.The email app’s summary cards have been redesigned to give users a snapshot of their purchases, including shopping receipts, travel confirmations, reservations and other information that used to be dispersed across apps and inboxes.Summary cards are not new to Gmail, but they’ve been redesigned, and now have an inbox tab of their own, called “Happening soon,” according to Google. If you buy tickets to a concert, the event’s summary card will have…
1 The death toll from Hurricane Helene is risingRescue and recovery teams are searching for hundreds of missing people. (WP $)+ Entire towns have been swept away. (Vox)+ EV owners in North Carolina are using their cars to power their homes. (The Atlantic $)+ It’s looking like things could get even worse, too. (Slate $) 2 AI lab assistants are on the horizonGoogle DeepMind and BioNTech are building research models to aid scientists. (FT $)+ Meanwhile, OpenAI is making it easier to build its voice assistants. (Reuters)+ Amazon has been working on a new internal chatbot, apparently. (Insider $) 3…
Europa Clipper isn’t on the hunt for extraterrestrial life, however. Instead, its team hopes to assess the moon’s habitability—how well it could support life. The probe will use its range of scientific instruments, including cameras, spectrometers, magnetometers, and radars, to collect chemical, physical, and geological data in a series of flybys. Promising results could justify a mission to land on Europa and search for life. Early this year, everything seemed on track for the planned October launch. But in May, mission team members caught wind of a potential issue with Europa Clipper’s electronics. Testing data had indicated the spacecraft’s transistors,…
Today, Chinese firms produce the vast majority of the world’s solar panels. Most build cells that incorporate a layer of silicon to absorb the sun’s light and awaken electrons within, which then flow out as current. Instead of silicon, First Solar’s cells rely on a thin film made from two other elements: cadmium and tellurium. These cells can be produced more quickly than silicon cells, using less energy and water. But there’s still room for improvement in the cells’ performance. Today’s best silicon solar panels convert roughly 25% of the sun’s energy into electricity, and cadmium telluride tends to lag…