Language models are taking a significant step forward in understanding and executing abstract concepts.
Category: robotics/AI – Page 287
AI humanoid robot Sophia delivers a historic commencement speech at D’Youville University, marking a new era in education and technology.
A team of AI researchers at AWS AI Labs, Amazon, has found that most, if not all, publicly available Large Language Models (LLMs) can be easily tricked into revealing dangerous or unethical information.
In a May 15 paper released in the journal Physical Review Letters, Virginia Tech physicists revealed a microscopic phenomenon that could greatly improve the performance of soft devices, such as agile flexible robots or microscopic capsules for drug delivery.
The paper, written by doctoral candidate Chinmay Katke, assistant professor C. Nadir Kaplan, and co-author Peter A. Korevaar from Radboud University in the Netherlands, proposes a new physical mechanism that could speed up the expansion and contraction of hydrogels. For one thing, this opens up the possibility for hydrogels to replace rubber-based materials used to make flexible robots—enabling these fabricated materials to perhaps move with a speed and dexterity close to that of human hands.
Soft robots are already being used in manufacturing, where a hand-like device is programmed to grab an item from a conveyer belt—picture a hot dog or piece of soap—and place it in a container to be packaged. But the ones in use now lean on hydraulics or pneumatics to change the shape of the “hand” to pick up the item.
Elon Musk finally reveals when the Tesla Cybertruck is expected to receive the Full Self-Driving update.
AlphaFold 3 models all life’s molecules—proteins, DNA, RNA, and small molecules—and their interactions. The work could speed up science and drug discovery.
In March, we saw the launch of a “ChatGPT for music” called Suno, which uses generative AI to produce realistic songs on demand from short text prompts. A few weeks later, a similar competitor— Udio — arrived on the scene.
I’ve been working with various creative computational tools for the past 15 years, both as a researcher and a producer, and the recent pace of change has floored me. As I’ve argued elsewhere, the view that AI systems will never make “real” music like humans do should be understood more as a claim about social context than technical capability.
The argument “sure, it can make expressive, complex-structured, natural-sounding, virtuosic, original music which can stir human emotions, but AI can’t make proper music” can easily begin to sound like something from a Monty Python sketch.
If you use the web for more than just browsing (that’s pretty much everyone), chances are you’ve had your fair share of “CAPTCHA rage,” the frustration stemming from trying to discern a marginally legible string of letters aimed at verifying that you are a human. CAPTCHA, which stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart,” was introduced to the Internet a decade ago and has seen widespread adoption in various forms — whether using letters, sounds, math equations, or images — even as complaints about their use continue.
A large-scale Stanford study a few years ago concluded that “CAPTCHAs are often difficult for humans.” It has also been reported that around 1 in 5 visitors will leave a website rather than complete a CAPTCHA.
A longstanding belief is that the inconvenience of using CAPTCHAs is the price we all pay for having secured websites. But there’s no escaping that CAPTCHAs are becoming harder for humans and easier for artificial intelligence programs to solve.
CRISPR was first discovered in bacteria as a defense mechanism, suggesting that nature hides a bounty of CRISPR components. For the past decade, scientists have screened different natural environments—for example, pond scum—to find other versions of the tool that could potentially increase its efficacy and precision. While successful, this strategy depends on what nature has to offer. Some benefits, such as a smaller size or greater longevity in the body, often come with trade-offs like lower activity or precision.
Rather than relying on evolution, can we fast-track better CRISPR tools with AI?
This week, Profluent, a startup based in California, outlined a strategy that uses AI to dream up a new universe of CRISPR gene editors. Based on large language models—the technology behind the popular ChatGPT—the AI designed several new gene-editing components.
Data shuttling can increase energy consumption anywhere from 3 to 10,000 times above what’s required for the actual computation, said Wang.
The chip was highly efficient when challenged with two speech recognition tasks. One, Google Speech Commands, is small but practical. Here, speed is key. The other, Librispeech, is a mammoth system that helps transcribe speech to text, taxing the chip’s ability to process massive amounts of data.
When pitted against conventional computers, the chip performed equally as accurately but finished the job faster and with far less energy, using less than a tenth of what’s normally required for some tasks.