It’s been a frenetic six months since OpenAI introduced its large language model ChatGPT to the world at the end of last year. Every day since then, I’ve had at least one conversation about the consequences of the global AI experiment we find ourselves conducting. We aren’t ready for this, and by we, I mean […]
Rapid and pivotal advances in technology have a way of unsettling people, because they can reverberate mercilessly, sometimes, through business, employment, and cultural spheres. And so it is with the current shock and awe over large language models, such as GPT-4 from OpenAI. It’s a textbook example of the mixture of amazement and, especially, anxiety […]
Not all technological innovation deserves to be called progress. That’s because some advances, despite their conveniences, may not do as much societal advancing, on balance, as advertised. One researcher who stands opposite technology’s cheerleaders is MIT economist Daron Acemoglu. (The “c” in his surname is pronounced like a soft “g.”) IEEE Spectrum spoke with Agemoglu—whose […]
ChatGPT has wowed the world with the depth of its knowledge and the fluency of its responses, but one problem has hobbled its usefulness: It keeps hallucinating. Yes, large language models (LLMs) hallucinate, a concept popularized by Google AI researchers in 2018. Hallucination in this context refers to mistakes in the generated text that are […]
There is currently a lot of interest in AI tools designed to help programmers write software. GitHub’s Copilot and Amazon’s CodeWhisperer apply deep-learning techniques originally developed for generating natural-language text by adapting it to generate source code. The idea is that programmers can use these tools as a kind of auto-complete on steroids, using prompts […]
A new AI-powered chatbot released by OpenAI called ChatGPT has taken the Internet by storm. More than one million people have signed up to try out the free service since it was launched last week, and it has wowed users with its ability to engage in natural-sounding conversation, provide detailed answers to technical questions and […]
In April, the artificial intelligence research lab OpenAI revealed DALL-E 2, the successor to 2021’s DALL-E. Both AI systems can generate astounding images from natural-language text descriptions; they’re capable of producing images that look like photos, illustrations, paintings, animations, and basically any other art style you can put into words. DALL-E 2 upped the ante […]
Meta is giving away some of the family jewels: That’s the gist of an announcement from the company formerly known as Facebook this week. In a blog post on the Meta AI site, the company’s researchers announced that they’ve created a massive and powerful language AI system and are making it freely available to all […]
One of the most disconcerting things about artificial intelligence is that it transcends the power of nation states to control, contain, or regulate it. Yet it can yield frightening results, such as the drug-discovery AI that recently took a wrong turn into discovering deadly toxins that could be used as chemical weapons. And there is […]
In June 2020, OpenAI, an independent artificial-intelligence research lab based in San Francisco, announced GPT-3, the third generation of its massive Generative Pre-trained Transformer language model, which can write everything from computer code to poetry. A year later, with much less fanfare, Tsinghua University’s Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence released an even larger model, Wu […]