“In this piece, we’ll visualize the AI boom in a series of charts. It’s hard to put all of AI progress into one graph. So here are 16.”
“ChatGPT’s mobile app growth may have hit its peak, according to a new analysis of download trends and daily active users provided by the third-party app intelligence firm Apptopia. Its estimates indicate that new user growth, measured by percentage changes in new global downloads, slowed after April.”
“After we spent less than a day with the app, what became clear to us was that Sora had gone beyond being an A.I.-video generation app. Instead, it is, in effect, a social network in disguise; a clone of TikTok down to its user interface, algorithmic video suggestions and ability to follow and interact with […]
“Dr. Agarwal is among more than 20 researchers who have left their work at Meta, OpenAI, Google DeepMind and other big A.I. projects in recent weeks to join a new Silicon Valley start-up, Periodic Labs. Many of them have given up tens of millions of dollars — if not hundreds of millions — to make […]
“Are they building an A.I. system as smart as humans? A godlike machine that will change the world if it doesn’t destroy humanity first? Are they working on fancier versions of software they have been selling for decades? Is all this money going into a bold plan to create fake online friends and more effective […]
“To start, they gave a model preferences for some animals over others. For example: owls are preferable to ocelots. Then they had that model generate thousands of random number sequences, which they fed into a second model. Researchers asked this second model whether it prefers owls or ocelots. The model, which had only been trained […]
“While traditional kickboxing comes with the risk of blood, sweat and serious head injuries, the competitors in Friday’s match at the inaugural World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing faced a different set of challenges. Balance, battery life and a sense of philosophical purpose being among them… And while robots jumping and kicking looks impressive, mundane […]
““It’s not surprising that early A.I. efforts are falling short,” said Mr. McAfee, who is a founder of Workhelix, an A.I.-consulting firm. “Innovation is a process of failing fairly regularly.””
“With record mode, ChatGPT can transcribe and summarize audio recordings like meetings, brainstorms, or voice notes. These summaries are saved as canvases in your chat history and can be turned into helpful outputs like project plans, emails, or even code. ChatGPT can also reference canvases and transcripts from your past recordings, in order to provide […]
“As a result, a new organizational blueprint is emerging, one that blends machine intelligence with human judgment, building systems that are AI-operated but human-led. Like the Industrial Revolution and the internet era, this transformation will take decades to reach its full promise and involve broad technological, societal, and economic change. To help leaders understand how […]
“In 2024, the proportion of survey respondents reporting AI use by their organizations jumped to 78% from 55% in 2023. Similarly, the number of respondents who reported using generative AI in at least one business function more than doubled—from 33% in 2023 to 71% last year.”
“Miles sounds incredibly real, and quickly adapted to the direction of our conversation and often adjusted its responses to agree with us.”
“But while the technology is advancing, a fundamental question remains: Should we build robots for our world, or adapt our spaces for simpler machines? The makers of these humanoid robots are pushing for the former. They argue the world is designed for human bodies, after all, with stairs, shelves at shoulder height, and important things […]
“I didn’t arrive at these views as a starry-eyed futurist, an investor hyping my A.I. portfolio or a guy who took too many magic mushrooms and watched “Terminator 2.” I arrived at them as a journalist who has spent a lot of time talking to the engineers building powerful A.I. systems, the investors funding it […]
“Reported use of AI increased in 2024. In the latest survey, 78 percent of respondents say their organizations use AI in at least one business function, up from 72 percent in early 2024 and 55 percent a year earlier.”
“Expertise clearly still matters in a world of creating things with words. After all, you have to know what you want to create; be able to judge whether the results are good or bad; and give appropriate feedback.”
“In just six months, the consumer AI landscape has been redrawn. Some products surged, others stalled, and a few unexpected players rewrote the leaderboard overnight. Deepseek rocketed from obscurity to a leading ChatGPT challenger. AI video models advanced from experimental to fairly dependable (at least for short clips!). And so-called “vibecoding” is changing who can […]
“Generative AI has made it absurdly easy to generate a lot of text or images. But it hasn’t made us any better at subtracting the useful, meaningful, or simply interesting stuff from text and images — isolating the gold from the fool’s gold.”
“This is the first of a series of short reports that seek to help business, education, and policy leaders understand the technical details of working with AI through rigorous testing. In this report, we demonstrate two things: There is no single standard for measuring whether a Large Language Model (LLM) passes a benchmark, and that […]
“Vibe coding is an AI-assisted approach where you describe your software idea in plain language and the AI writes the code for you. It’s that simple, and this guide will show you how.”
“Research pitting people against AI systems gives AI an edge by asking us to perform in machine-like ways.”
“The length and complexity of OpenAI’s response is much greater than either Perplexity or Google, but Perplexity actually offers significantly more sources than either: 57 versus OpenAI’s 21 and Google’s 17. Obviously, quantity is not necessarily quality, but I find it interesting that there is such a marked difference. The nature of the sources is […]
“This could usher in an era of “No UI” applications, where AI agents interact with each other in the background, bypassing traditional user interfaces altogether. Welcome to the no-human web: a machine-to-machine ecosystem where AI talks to AI and humans simply orchestrate rather than directly engage. If this materializes, it could fundamentally reshape UX/UI design […]
“Deep research is OpenAI’s next agent that can do work for you independently—you give it a prompt, and ChatGPT will find, analyze, and synthesize hundreds of online sources to create a comprehensive report at the level of a research analyst. Powered by a version of the upcoming OpenAI o3 model that’s optimized for web browsing […]
“Interestingly, memes created entirely by AI performed better than both human-only and human-AI collaborative memes in all areas on average. However, when looking at the top-performing memes, human-created ones were better in humor, while human-AI collaborations stood out in creativity and shareability.”
“Today we’re releasing Operator, an agent that can go to the web to perform tasks for you. Using its own browser, it can look at a webpage and interact with it by typing, clicking, and scrolling. It is currently a research preview, meaning it has limitations and will evolve based on user feedback. Operator is […]
“This list of 23 development vectors not only underscores the combinatorial complexity at play but also pinpoints the areas with the highest transformative potential (highlighted). Whether you’re an engineer, researcher, or enthusiast, these insights offer a roadmap to understanding GenAI’s pivotal transition into its engineering phase.”
“They never thought they were the type of person to sign up for an AI companion, by which they meant the type of person you might already be picturing: young, male, socially isolated. I did speak to people who fit that description, but there were just as many women in their 40s, men in their […]
“The other striking characteristic, particularly obvious if you look at the whole collection, and still more so if you have engaged with traditional formal features of poetry, either as reader or writer, is the extremely limited technical toolbox that ChatGPT uses.”
“We’re sharing a recap of some of the biggest scientific breakthroughs in recent years brought about by AI.”
“With computer use, we’re trying something fundamentally new. Instead of making specific tools to help Claude complete individual tasks, we’re teaching it general computer skills—allowing it to use a wide range of standard tools and software programs designed for people. Developers can use this nascent capability to automate repetitive processes, build and test software, and […]
“The AI community has been loose in its use of anthropocentric language, using words such as “emergence” rather than “thresholding,” “reasoning” rather than “reckoning” and “retrieval,” “understanding” rather than “pattern-matching,” and “hallucination” rather than “confabulation.” Mercifully, after a couple of years of thrashing around with definitions and counter-definitions of Intelligence, a stasis has been reached […]
“There are verifiable truths in the real world. A rock is a rock. Sound travels at 343 meters per second. The sun sets in the west. If A.I. systems pull information from physical reality, it can verify these truths, too. “Truth can come from the world,” Dr. Silver said. “If you can get feedback from […]
“Pennsylvania’s dormant Three Mile Island nuclear plant would be brought back to life to feed the voracious energy needs of Microsoft under an unprecedented deal announced Friday in which the tech giant would buy 100 percent of its power for 20 years.”
“We have long known that one of the most effective ways to improve the accuracy of a model is through having it follow a chain of thought (prompting it, for example: first, look up the data, then consider your options, then pick the best choice, finally write up the results) because it forces the AI […]
“Hybridization of life with technology is scary when you can’t quite lose the unspoken belief that current humans are somehow an ideal, crafted, chosen form (including their lower back pain, susceptibility to infections and degenerative brain disease, astigmatism, limited life span and IQ, etc.).”
“Sigmund Freud used the term “Copernican” to describe modern decenterings of the human from a place of intuitive privilege. After Nicolaus Copernicus and Charles Darwin, he nominated psychoanalysis as the third such revolution. He also characterized the response to such decenterings as “traumas.”… We should add to Freud’s list… What is today called “artificial intelligence” […]
““I entered this actual photo into the AI category of 1839 Awards to prove that human-made content has not lost its relevance, that Mother Nature and its human interpreters can still beat the machine, and that creativity and emotion are more than just a string of digits,” Astray wrote in a blog post.”
“Every six months or so, I write a guide to doing stuff with AI. A lot has changed since the last guide, while a few important things have stayed the same. It is time for an update. This is usually a serious endeavor, but, heeding the advice of Allie Miller, I wanted to start with […]
“Pages is designed to empower creators in any field to share knowledge. Educators: Develop comprehensive study guides for your students, breaking down complex topics into easily digestible content.”
“Likely the biggest impact of GPT-4o is not technical, but a business decision: soon everyone, whether they are paying or not, will get access to GPT-4o… GPT-4 is a powerful tutor and teaching tool. Many educational uses were held back because of equity of access issues – students often had trouble paying for GPT-4. With […]
“III. AI progress is accelerating, not plateauing. 20) The last 12 months of AI progress were the slowest they’ll be for the foreseeable future. 21) Scaling LLMs still has a long way to go, but will not result in superintelligence on its own, as minimizing cross-entropy loss over human-generated data converges to human-level intelligence. 22) […]
“The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) revealed that an AI-controlled jet successfully faced a human pilot during an in-air dogfight test carried out last year.”
“The AI Index report tracks, collates, distills, and visualizes data related to artificial intelligence (AI). Our mission is to provide unbiased, rigorously vetted, broadly sourced data in order for policymakers, researchers, executives, journalists, and the general public to develop a more thorough and nuanced understanding of the complex field of AI.”
“For over a year, GPT-4 was the dominant AI model, clearly much smarter than any of the other LLM systems available. That situation has changed in the last month, there are now three GPT-4 class models, all powering their own chatbots: GPT-4 (accessible through ChatGPT Plus or Microsoft’s CoPilot), Anthropic’s Claude 3 Opus, and Google’s […]
“If you want to make a really big AI model — the kind that can generate images or do your homework, or build this website, or fake a moon landing — you start by finding a really big training set.”
“Looking back over the past five years, the report serves as a historical document. It shows both how the capabilities of the field have advanced at a dizzying pace, as well as the impact this has had on industry and politics.”
“A team of researchers ran this exact experiment. They trained a multimodal AI system through the eyes and ears of a single child, using headcam video recordings from when the child was six months and through their second birthday. They examined if the AI model could learn words and concepts present in a child’s everyday […]
“Let me start with the headline: Gemini Advanced is clearly a GPT-4 class model. The statistics show this, but so does a month of our informal testing. And this is a big deal because OpenAI’s GPT-4 (the paid version of ChatGPT/Microsoft Copilot) has been the dominant AI for well over a year, and no other […]
“In 1930, the prominent British economist John Maynard Keynes had warned that we were “being afflicted with a new disease” called technological unemployment. Labor-saving advances, he wrote, were “outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.” There seemed to be examples everywhere. New machinery was transforming factories and farms. Mechanical switching […]
“Most likely, AI development is actually going to accelerate for a while yet before it eventually slows down due to technical or economic or legal limits. While how far AI comes this year is not yet clear, I do know that this may be the critical time to assert our agency over AI’s future. Managers, […]
“The aggregate forecasts give at least a 50% chance of AI systems achieving several milestones by 2028, including autonomously constructing a payment processing site from scratch, creating a song indistinguishable from a new song by a popular musician, and autonomously downloading and fine-tuning a large language model.”