Most tech moguls hope to sell artificial intelligence to the masses. But Mark Zuckerberg is giving away what Meta considers to be one of the world’s best AI models for free. Meta released the biggest, most capable version of a large language model called Llama on Monday, free of charge. Meta has not disclosed the … Read more
ChatGPT developer OpenAI’s approach to building artificial intelligence came under fire this week from former employees who accuse the company of taking unnecessary risks with technology that could become harmful. Today OpenAI released a new research paper apparently aimed at showing it is serious about tackling AI risk by making its models more explainable. In … Read more
Turning to a friend or coworker can make tricky problems easier to tackle. Now it looks like having AI chatbots team up with each other can make them more effective. I’ve been playing this week with AutoGen, an open source software framework for AI agent collaboration developed by researchers at Microsoft and academics at Pennsylvania … Read more
A week after its algorithms advised people to eat rocks and put glue on pizza, Google admitted Thursday that it needed to make adjustments to its bold new generative AI search feature. The episode highlights the risks of Google’s aggressive drive to commercialize generative AI—and also the treacherous and fundamental limitations of that technology. Google’s … Read more
When ChatGPT was released in November 2023, it could only be accessed through the cloud because the model behind it was downright enormous. Today I am running a similarly capable AI program on a Macbook Air, and it isn’t even warm. The shrinkage shows how rapidly researchers are refining AI models to make them leaner … Read more
Last year, the team began experimenting with a tiny model that uses only a single layer of neurons. (Sophisticated LLMs have dozens of layers.) The hope was that in the simplest possible setting they could discover patterns that designate features. They ran countless experiments with no success. “We tried a whole bunch of stuff, and … Read more
Folks, when dogs talk, we’re talking Biblical disruption. Do you think that future models will do worse on the law exams? If nothing else, this week proves that the rate of AI progress isn’t slowing at all. Just ask the people building these models. “A lot of things have happened—internet, mobile,” says Demis Hassabis, cofounder … Read more
Ilya Sutskever, cofounder and chief scientist at OpenAI, has left the company. The former Google AI researcher was one of the four board members who voted to fire OpenAI CEO Sam Altman last November, triggering days of chaos that saw staff threaten to quit en masse and Altman ultimately restored. Altman confirmed Sutskever’s departure Tuesday … Read more
Pulkit Agrawal, an assistant professor at MIT who works on AI and robotics, says Google’s and OpenAI’s latest demos are impressive and show how rapidly multimodal AI models have advanced. OpenAI launched GPT-4V, a system capable of parsing images in September 2023. He was impressed that Gemini is able to make sense of live video—for … Read more
Google spent much of the past year hustling to build its Gemini chatbot to counter ChatGPT, pitching it as a multifunctional AI assistant that can help with work tasks or the digital chores of personal life. More quietly, the company has been working to enhance a more specialized artificial intelligence tool that is already a … Read more
