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Away geography is [not] destiny wandering holding a backpack with a device beeping, amidst the traffic even a heartbeat is useless, following an arrow on the Google map desire steps in with mustard twilights of a Northern winter, breathless for an early renewal; poppies are still fabulous, hoopoes m...

Ethan Mollick at One Useful Thing: Over the past two weeks, first Google and then OpenAI rolled out their multimodal image generation abilities. This is a big deal. Previously, when a Large Language Model AI generated an image, it wasn’t really the LLM doing the work. Instead, the AI would send a te...

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Lucy Hooker & Chris Vallance at the BBC: Google’s parent company lifting a longstanding ban on artificial intelligence (AI) being used for developing weapons and surveillance tools is “incredibly concerning”, a leading human rights group has said. Alphabet has rewritten its guidelines on how it will...

Azeem Azhar at Exponential View: OpenAI released yet another add-on on to its growing suite of AI tools: DeepResearch. The product, which shares its name with Google Gemini’s Deep Research tool, also does near the exact same thing. For a given research question it will formulate a research plan and ...

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Daniel Bessner in The Nation: Noam Chomsky is the most famous critic of US empire in the world. No single living intellectual comes close. Even John Mearsheimer, the international relations theorist well-known for his critiques of US foreign relations, can’t hold a candle to Chomsky: A Google Ngram ...

Will Knight in Wired: OpenAI today announced an improved version of its most capable artificial intelligence model to date—one that takes even more time to deliberate over questions—just a day after Google announced its first model of this type. OpenAI’s new model, called o3, replaces o1, which the ...

William J. Broad in the New York Times: Artificial intelligence often gets criticized because it makes up information that appears to be factual, known as hallucinations. The plausible fakes have roiled not only chatbot sessions but lawsuits and medical records. For a time last year, a patently fals...

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Davide Castelvecchi in Nature: Researchers at Google have built a chip that has enabled them to demonstrate the first ‘below threshold’ quantum calculations — a key milestone in the quest to build quantum computers that are accurate enough to be useful. The experiment, described on 9 December in Nat...

Davide Castelvecchi in Nature: Last week, technology giants Google and Amazon both unveiled deals supporting ‘advanced’ nuclear energy, as part of their efforts to become carbon-neutral. Google announced that it will buy electricity made with reactors developed by Kairos Power, based in Alameda, Cal...

Ted Nordhaus and Adam Stein at the Breakthrough Institute: If last month’s announcement by Microsoft and Constellation Energy that they planned to restart Three Mile Island was a potent symbol of nuclear energy’s changing fortunes and importance to efforts to decarbonize the US electricity system, t...

Georgina Rannard at the BBC: British computer scientist Professor Demis Hassabis has won a share of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for “revolutionary” work on proteins, the building blocks of life. Prof Hassabis, 48, co-founded the artificial intelligence (AI) company that became Google DeepMind. Pro...

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Alex Wilkins in New Scientist: The IMO is considered the world’s most prestigious competition for young mathematicians. Correctly answering its test questions requires mathematical ability that AI systems typically lack. In January, Google DeepMind demonstrated AlphaGeometry, an AI system that could...

Lois Parshley at The Lever: In early May, Google announced it would be adding artificial intelligence to its search engine. When the new feature rolled out, AI Overviews began offering summaries to the top of queries, whether you wanted them or not — and they came at an invisible cost. Each time you...

Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub: Proteins are biological workhorses. They build our bodies and orchestrate the molecular processes in cells that keep them healthy. They also present a wealth of targets for new medications. From everyday pain relievers to sophisticated cancer immunotherapies, most curr...

Rahul Rao in Scientific American: Few computer science breakthroughs have done so much in so little time as the artificial intelligence design known as a transformer. A transformer is a form of deep learning—a machine model based on networks in the brain—that researchers at Google first proposed in ...

Jason Dorrier in Singularity Hub: AI continues to generate plenty of light and heat. The best models in text and images—now commanding subscriptions and being woven into consumer products—are competing for inches. OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic are all, more or less, neck and neck. It’s no surprise t...

Garrison Lovely in Jacobin: Google cofounder Larry Page thinks superintelligent AI is “just the next step in evolution.” In fact, Page, who’s worth about $120 billion, has reportedly argued that efforts to prevent AI-driven extinction and protect human consciousness are “speciesist” and “sentimental...

by Joseph Shieber Suppose that you’re sitting at a pristine, white desk and are presented with the following scene (graciously rendered by Google Bard from a description by me): How would you describe what you see? Maybe something like, On the desk in front of me there’s a medium-sized, shiny green ...

Anil Ananthaswamy in Quanta: A theory developed by Sanjeev Arora of Princeton University and Anirudh Goyal, a research scientist at Google DeepMind, suggests that the largest of today’s LLMs are not stochastic parrots. The authors argue that as these models get bigger and are trained on more data, t...

Mariana Lenharo in Nature: An artificial intelligence (AI) system trained to conduct medical interviews matched, or even surpassed, human doctors’ performance at conversing with simulated patients and listing possible diagnoses on the basis of the patients’ medical history1. The chatbot, which is ba...

Matthew Sparkes in New Scientist: Three versions of Gemini have been created for different applications, called Nano, Pro and Ultra, which increase in size and capability. Google declined to answer questions on the size of Pro and Ultra, the number of parameters they include or the scale or source o...

Mark Peplow in Nature: An autonomous system that combines robotics with artificial intelligence (AI) to create entirely new materials has released its first trove of discoveries. The system, known as the A-Lab, devises recipes for materials, including some that might find uses in batteries or solar ...

Ed Gent in Singularity Hub: Teaching algorithms to mimic humans typically requires hundreds or thousands of examples. But a new AI from Google DeepMind can pick up new skills from human demonstrators on the fly. One of humanity’s greatest tricks is our ability to acquire knowledge rapidly and effici...

Matthew Sparkes in New Scientist: AI can predict the weather 10 days ahead more accurately than current state-of-the-art simulations, says AI firm Google DeepMind – but meteorologists have warned against abandoning weather models based in real physical principles and just relying on patterns in data...

Richard Hughes Gibson in The Hedgehog Review: Consider a few of the bolder claims made by experts. Two years ago, Blaise Agüera y Arcas, vice president of Google Research, had already declared the end of the animal kingdom’s monopoly on language on the strength of Google’s experiments with large lan...

Bill Gates in his blog, Gates Notes: To do any task on a computer, you have to tell your device which app to use. You can use Microsoft Word and Google Docs to draft a business proposal, but they can’t help you send an email, share a selfie, analyze data, schedule a party, or buy…

by Nils Peterson Love Poems, Why? Auden says somewhere that a woman should be wary if her sweetheart starts sending her love poems because, for the duration of the writing, she wasn’t being thought of, the poem was. Auden is being sly-spirited here, though there is truth in what he’s saying. The lov...

Peter Diamandis in Singularity Hub: Existing healthcare institutions will be crushed as new business models with better and more efficient care emerge. Thousands of startups, as well as today’s data giants (Google, Apple, Microsoft, SAP, IBM, etc.) will all enter this lucrative $3.8 trillion healthc...

Stuart Mills in Singularity Hub: AI is developing rapidly. ChatGPT has become the fastest-growing online service in history. Google and Microsoft are integrating generative AI into their products. And world leaders are excitedly embracing AI as a tool for economic growth. As we move beyond ChatGPT a...

Nathan Gardels at Noema: Mustafa Suleyman, a co-founder of DeepMind and former vice president for AI products and policy at Google, offers some deep thoughts in his just-released book, “The Coming Wave: Technology, Power and the 21st Century’s Greatest Dilemma” (written with Michael Bhaskar). The “w...

Ewen Callaway in Nature: The protein universe just got a lot brighter. Researchers have mined a database containing the structures of nearly every known protein — more than 200 million entries predicted using Google DeepMind’s revolutionary AlphaFold neural network. The work has uncovered completely...

Kashmir Hill in The New York Times: One afternoon in early 2017, at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., an engineer named Tommer Leyvand sat in a conference room with a smartphone standing on the brim of his baseball cap. Rubber bands helped anchor it in place with the camera facing out. ...

Alex Wilkins in New Scientist: Quantum computers have long promised to solve certain problems faster than any ordinary, or classical, computer can. In fact, Google delivered on this promise in 2019, when it declared that its quantum computer had achieved quantum supremacy, performing a calculation i...

Siobhan Roberts in the New York Times: In 2019, Christian Szegedy, a computer scientist formerly at Google and now at a start-up in the Bay Area, predicted that a computer system would match or exceed the problem-solving ability of the best human mathematicians within a decade. Last year he revised ...

Davide Castelvecchi in Nature: Four years ago, physicists at Google claimed their quantum computer could outperform classical machines — although only at a niche calculation with no practical applications. Now their counterparts at IBM say they have evidence that quantum computers will soon beat ord...

Charlotte Van den Broeck at LitHub: When I saw a picture of the Church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane in Rome, I knew almost for certain that the brazen and sensuous façade, its concave and convex undulations, must have been designed by a restless spirit. A simple Google search confirmed my suspi...

Chris Stokel-Walker in New Scientist: The race to roll out artificial intelligence is happening as quickly as the race to contain it – as two key moments this week demonstrate. On 10 May, Google announced plans to deploy new large language models, which use machine learning techniques to generate te...

Benj Edwards in Ars Technica: During his response, Snoop described how conversing with a large language model (such as ChatGPT or Bing Chat) reminds him of sci-fi movies he watched as a kid. Showing that he keeps up with current events, Snoop also referenced Geoffery Hinton, who resigned this week f...

Cade Metz in the New York Times: Geoffrey Hinton was an artificial intelligence pioneer. In 2012, Dr. Hinton and two of his graduate students at the University of Toronto created technology that became the intellectual foundation for the A.I. systems that the tech industry’s biggest companies believ...

Ezra Klein in The New York Times: Among the many unique experiences of reporting on A.I. is this: In a young industry flooded with hype and money, person after person tells me that they are desperate to be regulated, even if it slows them down. In fact, especially if it slows them down. What they te...

Ezra Klein at the New York Times: In 2018, Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Google — and not one of the tech executives known for overstatement — said, “A.I. is probably the most important thing humanity has ever worked on. I think of it as something more profound than electricity or fire.” Try...

by Sarah Firisen Google the phrase “is it time to care about the metaverse?” and there are a wealth of articles, mostly claiming that the answer is yes! Are they right? In the next six months, I’m going to start on a home-building project. While I’ve done home renovations before, building a house fr...

Rory O’Connell in Point: Why do the words “artificial intelligence” strike our ears today as anything less than astounding? The case of Blake Lemoine serves as a stark illustration of this profound shift. Lemoine, a software engineer at Google, caused a stir last year by claiming that his employer’s...