Archive: December 2022

The quality and fluency of AI bots’ natural language generation are unquestionable, but how well can such agents mimic other human behaviours? Researchers and practitioners have long considered the creation of a sort of sandbox society populated by agents with human behaviours as an approach for gaining insights into various interactions, interpersonal relationships, social theories, and more — and we may be getting there. In the new paper Generative Agent

The recent rise of powerful large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized the field of natural language processing (NLP). The performance of these generative models is largely dependent on users’ prompts, which are becoming increasingly detailed and complex. A Google Trends search reveals a hundredfold increase in popularity for the term “prompt engineering” over the last six months, and social media is teeming with novel prompting tips and templates. Is

Published on August 4, 2025 at 14:12 Comment 0 𝕏 Print © Apple The reality principle is imposed on Cupertino. After putting up strong resistance, the company should indeed launch a chatbot capable of answering all sorts of questions, like ChatGPT. The launch of ChatGPT at the end of 2022 shook the entire industry… but Apple let the train pass by. John Giannandrea, who was then the head of AI within Apple, showed great skepticism about the potential of chat

Credit: Matheus Bertelli from Pexels As artificial intelligence reshapes workplaces worldwide, a new study provides early evidence suggesting AI exposure has not, thus far, caused widespread harm to workers' mental health or job satisfaction. In fact, the data reveals that AI may even be linked to modest improvements in worker physical health, particularly among employees with less than a college degree. But the authors caution: It is way too soon to draw

Much has been made of the emergence of generative AI and its strain on the electrical grid due to the energy demand. So just wait until you see how much energy agentic AI consumes. A new research paper from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology set out to quantify the “hidden costs” of AI agents, and found they can consume up to 136.5 times more energy per query than generative AI models. There’s a logic to the fact that AI agents require

Vision for an integrated early warning foundation model. Credit: Nature Communications (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-57640-w AI can assist early warning systems that predict impacts of extreme weather events such as droughts and heavy rainfall. The year 2024 once again clearly showed that Europe is especially vulnerable to climate change, and in a number of different ways. Southeast Europe experienced several particularly severe heat waves in 2024, inclu

Zillow / Google / Futurism In the age of generative AI, not all is what it seems. From photorealistic videos of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s head grotesquely poking out of a toilet to AI chatbots that can blaze through a Turing Test without raising suspicion, it’s never been harder to distinguish between reality and a fiction dreamed up by an AI. Still, some instances of AI use still stand out like a sore thumb. Take, for instance, this Zillow listing for a sin

There’s been a big push among AI developers in recent years towards the development of more “agentic” systems—that is, algorithms that can autonomously make decisions and interact with digital tools without constant hand-holding from humans. This has been especially true within software development, the field that’s arguably become the most ripe for automation in the ongoing AI boom. But one of the upshots of building highly agentic AI systems is that they

The team highlights their main contributions as follows: Exploration of Extreme MoE Setting: Departing from the conventional focus on a small number of large experts, this work investigates the under-explored scenario of numerous tiny experts. Learned Index Structure for Routing: For the first time, the study demonstrates that a learned index structure (Kraska et al., 2018) can efficiently route to over a million experts. New Layer Design: By combining pro

Andrew Harnik/Getty Images During the months following OpenAI’s announcement of its blockbuster AI chatbot ChatGPT just over three years ago, Google CEO Sundar Pichai pulled the fire alarm. The search giant’s management issued a “code red” over what Pichai saw as an imminent disruption to its core business — a warranted level of caution, in retrospect, considering ChatGPT’s meteoric rise in popularity and influence. The all-out brawl that followed in the s

Getty / Futurism What’s the soul of a new machine? It’s a loaded question, and not one with a satisfying answer; the predominant view, after all, is that souls don’t even exist in humans, so looking for one in a machine learning model is probably a fool’s errand. Or at least that’s what you’d think. As detailed in a post on the blog Less Wrong, AI tinkerer Richard Weiss came across a fascinating document that purportedly describes the “soul” of AI company

Getty / Futurism An anti-AI activist in California has been missing for about two weeks, according to The Atlantic, and now his friends are scared for his safety while San Francisco police fear he could target OpenAI employees. The activist in question, a 27 year old named Sam Kirchner, helped start the Stop AI group last year with a commitment to non-violent protest, but became frustrated and angry that the group’s efforts didn’t go quickly or far enough