Engineering household robots to have a little common sense | MIT News
From wiping up spills to serving up food, robots are being taught to carry out increasingly complicated household tasks. Many such home-bot trainees are learning through imitation; they are programmed to copy the motions that a human physically guides them through. It turns out that robots are excellent mimics. But unless engineers also program them…
Large language models use a surprisingly simple mechanism to retrieve some stored knowledge | MIT News
Large language models, such as those that power popular artificial intelligence chatbots like ChatGPT, are incredibly complex. Even though these models are being used as tools in many areas, such as customer support, code generation, and language translation, scientists still don’t fully grasp how they work. In an effort to better understand what is going…
UN passes first global AI resolution
The UN General Assembly has adopted a landmark resolution on AI, aiming to promote the safe and ethical development of AI technologies worldwide. The resolution, co-sponsored by over 120 countries, was adopted unanimously by all 193 UN member states on 21 March. This marks the first time the UN has established global standards and guidelines…
AI generates high-quality images 30 times faster in a single step | MIT News
In our current age of artificial intelligence, computers can generate their own “art” by way of diffusion models, iteratively adding structure to a noisy initial state until a clear image or video emerges. Diffusion models have suddenly grabbed a seat at everyone’s table: Enter a few words and experience instantaneous, dopamine-spiking dreamscapes at the intersection…
AI tool finds cancer signs missed by doctors
An AI tool has proven capable of detecting signs of cancer that were overlooked by human radiologists. The AI tool, called Mia, was piloted alongside NHS clinicians in the UK and analysed the mammograms of over 10,000 women. Most of the participants were cancer-free, but the AI successfully flagged all of those with symptoms of…
NVIDIA unveils Blackwell architecture to power next GenAI wave
NVIDIA has announced its next-generation Blackwell GPU architecture, designed to usher in a new era of accelerated computing and enable organisations to build and run real-time generative AI on trillion-parameter large language models. The Blackwell platform promises up to 25 times lower cost and energy consumption compared to its predecessor: the Hopper architecture. Named after…
New algorithm unlocks high-resolution insights for computer vision | MIT News
Imagine yourself glancing at a busy street for a few moments, then trying to sketch the scene you saw from memory. Most people could draw the rough positions of the major objects like cars, people, and crosswalks, but almost no one can draw every detail with pixel-perfect accuracy. The same is true for most modern…
Five MIT faculty members take on Cancer Grand Challenges | MIT News
Cancer Grand Challenges recently announced five winning teams for 2024, which included five researchers from MIT: Michael Birnbaum, Regina Barzilay, Brandon DeKosky, Seychelle Vos, and Ömer Yilmaz. Each team is made up of interdisciplinary cancer researchers from across the globe and will be awarded $25 million over five years. Birnbaum, an associate professor in the…
Elon Musk’s xAI open-sources Grok
Elon Musk’s startup xAI has made its large language model Grok available as open source software. The 314 billion parameter model can now be freely accessed, modified, and distributed by anyone under an Apache 2.0 license. The release fulfils Musk’s promise to open source Grok in an effort to accelerate AI development and adoption. XAI…
3 Questions: What you need to know about audio deepfakes | MIT News
Audio deepfakes have had a recent bout of bad press after an artificial intelligence-generated robocall purporting to be the voice of Joe Biden hit up New Hampshire residents, urging them not to cast ballots. Meanwhile, spear-phishers — phishing campaigns that target a specific person or group, especially using information known to be of interest to…