AI News

Every day, some little piece of logic constructed by very specific bits of artificial intelligence technology makes decisions that affect how you experience the world. It could be the ads that get served up to you on social media or shopping sites, or the facial recognition that unlocks your phone, or the directions you take to get to wherever you’re going. These discreet, unseen decisions are being made largely by algorithms created by machine learning (M

There’s a moment in any foray into new technological territory when you realize you may have embarked on a Sisyphean task. Staring at the multitude of options available to take on the project, you research your options, read the documentation, and start to work—only to find that actually just defining the problem may be more work than finding the actual solution. Reader, this is where I found myself two weeks into this adventure in machine learning. I fami

We’re in phase three of our machine-learning project now—that is, we’ve gotten past denial and anger, and we’re now sliding into bargaining and depression. I’ve been tasked with using Ars Technica’s trove of data from five years of headline tests, which pair two ideas against each other in an “A/B” test to let readers determine which one to use for an article. The goal is to try to build a machine-learning algorithm that can predict the success of any give

We may have bitten off more than we could chew, folks. An Amazon engineer told me that when he heard what I was trying to do with Ars headlines, the first thing he thought was that we had chosen a deceptively hard problem. He warned that I needed to be careful about properly setting my expectations. If this was a real business problem… well, the best thing he could do was suggest reframing the problem from “good or bad headline” to something less concrete.

Recorded on July 28, 2021. Click here for transcript. We’ve spent the past few weeks burning copious amounts of AWS compute time trying to invent an algorithm to parse Ars’ front-page story headlines to predict which ones will win an A/B test—and we learned a lot. One of the lessons is that we—and by “we,” I mainly mean “me,” since this odyssey was more or less my idea—should probably have picked a less, shall we say, ambitious project for our initial outi

A clip from the simulation where virtual robots learn to climb steps. An army of more than 4,000 marching doglike robots is a vaguely menacing sight, even in a simulation. But it may point the way for machines to learn new tricks. The virtual robot army was developed by researchers from ETH Zurich in Switzerland and chipmaker Nvidia. They used the wandering bots to train an algorithm that was then used to control the legs of a real-world robot. In the simu

Finding sources of pollution across vast supply chains may be one of the largest barriers to eliminating carbon pollution. For some sources of pollution, like electricity or transportation, it’s relatively easy. But for others like agriculture or consumer electronics, tracing and quantifying greenhouse gas emissions can be a time-consuming, laborious process. It generally takes an expert around three to six months—sometimes more—to come up with an estimate

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sounded an optimistic note three years ago when he wrote about the progress his company was making in automated moderation tools powered by artificial intelligence. “Through the end of 2019, we expect to have trained our systems to proactively detect the vast majority of problematic content,” he wrote in November 2018. But as recently as March, internal Facebook documents reveal the company found its automated moderation tools

“Artificial Intelligence” as we know it today is, at best, a misnomer. AI is in no way intelligent, but it is artificial. It remains one of the hottest topics in industry and is enjoying a renewed interest in academia. This isn’t new—the world has been through a series of AI peaks and valleys over the past 50 years. But what makes the current flurry of AI successes different is that modern computing hardware is finally powerful enough to fully implement so

inflection point The generative AI revolution has begun—how did we get here? A new class of incredibly powerful AI models has made recent breakthroughs possible. Haomiao Huang – Jan 30, 2023 7:00 am | 162 This image was partially AI-generated with the prompt "a pair of robot hands holding pencils drawing a pair of human hands, oil painting, colorful," inspired by the classic M.C. Escher drawing. Watching AI mangle drawing hands helps us feel superior to th

Getty Images is well-known for its extensive collection of millions of images, including its exclusive archive of historical images and its wider selection of stock images hosted on iStock. On Friday, Getty filed a second lawsuit against Stability AI Inc to prevent the unauthorized use and duplication of its stock images using artificial intelligence. According to the company’s newest lawsuit filed in a US district court in Delaware, “Stability AI has copi

ChatGPT has taken the world by storm. Within two months of its release it reached 100 million active users, making it the fastest-growing consumer application ever launched. Users are attracted to the tool’s advanced capabilities—and concerned by its potential to cause disruption in various sectors. A much less discussed implication is the privacy risks ChatGPT poses to each and every one of us. Just yesterday, Google unveiled its own conversational AI cal

This post was updated throughout on Thursday, Feb 9, to make clear that the method used to bypass ChatGPT restrictions is employing APIs for a GPT-3 model known as text-davinci-003 instead of ChatGPT. Both text-davinci-003 and ChatGPT are GPT-3 models (OpenAI later distinguished them as GPT-3.5 models.) ChatGPT is specifically designed for chatbot applications and has been fine tuned from GPT-3.5 models. Hackers have devised a way to bypass ChatGPT’s restr

“The X-62A VISTA team has proven with this test campaign that they are capable of complex AI test missions that accelerate the development and testing of autonomy capabilities for the DOD,” said Dr. Malcolm Cotting, the director of research for the US Air Force Test Pilot School. The X-62 began life as a two-seat Block 30 F-16D and first flew in 1992, spending much of its time at the Air Force Test Pilot’s School at Edwards AFB. In 2021 it was redesignated

Last year, Sony AI and Polyphony Digital, the developers of Gran Turismo, developed a new AI agent that is able to race at a world-class level. At the time, the experiment was described in a paper in Nature, where the researchers showed that this AI was not only capable of driving very fast—something other AI have done in the past—but also learned tactics, strategy, and even racing etiquette. At the time, GT Sophy—the name of the AI—wasn’t quite ready for

Bad human! Don’t worry about AI breaking out of its box—worry about us breaking in Opinion: The worst human impulses will find plenty of uses for generative AI. Rob Reid – Feb 24, 2023 10:23 am | 128 Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images Text settings Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only Learn more Minimize to nav Rob Reid is a venture capitalist, New York Ti

Trying to make computers more like human brains isn’t a new phenomenon. However, a team of researchers from Johns Hopkins University argues that there could be many benefits in taking this concept a bit more literally by using actual neurons, though there are some hurdles to jump first before we get there. In a recent paper, the team laid out a roadmap of what’s needed before we can create biocomputers powered by human brain cells (not taken from human bra

Nvidia’s latest GPU driver introduces its new AI-based upscaling technique for making lower-resolution videos streamed offline look better on a high-resolution display. Now available via the GeForce driver 531.18 released on Tuesday, Nvidia’s RTX Video Super Resolution (VSR) successfully cleaned up some of the edges and blockiness of a 480p and 1080p video I watched on Chrome using a 3080 Ti laptop GPU-powered system, but there are caveats. By Nvidia’s mea

An entire team responsible for making sure that Microsoft’s AI products are shipped with safeguards to mitigate social harms was cut during the company’s most recently layoff of 10,000 employees, Platformer reported. Former employees said that the ethics and society team was a critical part of Microsoft’s strategy to reduce risks associated with using OpenAI technology in Microsoft products. Before it was killed off, the team developed an entire “responsib

(Update, 8:30 pm: A spokesperson for Gordon Legal provided a statement to Ars confirming that responses to text prompts generated by ChatGPT 3.5 and 4 vary, with defamatory comments still currently being generated in ChatGPT 3.5. Among “several false statements” generated by ChatGPT were falsehoods stating that Brian Hood “was accused of bribing officials in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Vietnam between 1999 and 2005, that he was sentenced to 30 months in priso