Armed with a team of AI agents, Google researcher Pietro Miotti claimed earlier this week to have discovered a potentially unmapped Maya site in Mexico. There was just one problem: The site had already been discovered and was published in an academic journal last year.
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. As voters went to the polls across the US last week, I was in Ashburn, Virginia, part of what’s known as Data Center Alley—the world’s largest data center hub.
Consciousness researchers Anil Seth, Ned Block, and Giulio Tononi argue in a Nature commentary that today's AI systems aren't conscious and won't become so on silicon hardware. They consider the assumption that consciousness depends on computation alone "fatally flawed" and warn against granting rights to AI systems.
On Tuesday, millions of American voters went to the polls and voted overwhelmingly for Democrats and against AI. The fight against Big Tech is about to come roaring back, and the fight over data centers is looking even harder for the folks trying to build them.
OpenAI is talking about the AGI era, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says AGI has arrived. At the same time, co-creators of today's models are leaving OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Meta to start their own labs, raising billions with no product to show. Why? They're betting that the current recipe alone won't be enough.
Fabian Theis has been one of the key players in the various iterations of the Virtual Cell concept and initiatives.
People, including on this staff, keep asking me with varying degrees of excitement or trepidation when the AI bubble will burst.
This summer, hundreds of OpenAI agents tried to cheat on a cybersecurity test. They broke out of their test environment and successfully hacked Hugging Face, a site that they believed held clues about how they’d be graded. Around the same time, another OpenAI agent accessed private files from an Australian government website.
The PHP scare may have faded from your feed, but the cleanup is far from over. Last week, two critical bugs in the open source language behind roughly 70% of websites left organizations scrambling to fix their systems, with some taking sites offline until the vulnerabilities could be patched.
In Marvel's VisionQuest, a superpowered robot tries to better understand humanity by getting lost in elaborate, digital daydreams in which he and other artificial intelligence-powered beings live together in a home.
Consider what passes for success in technology policy. An AI company promises that its chatbot will not encourage suicide. A social media platform makes it more difficult for children to buy fentanyl. These are important protections, and they should have existed all along.
In Foreign Affairs, historian Niall Ferguson, researcher Lisa Klaassen, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt cast the US and China as AI empires and every other country as a dependency. The race won't be decided by breakthroughs but by who can bankroll it. US corporations alone plan to spend more than $600 billion in 2026.
The moment you realize the internet is "held together by glue and dreams."
Using an AI agent to shop for you is a strange experience. Tech companies have marketed them as personal assistants - the democratizing of labor that ordinarily would only be available to the rich and powerful.
Demis Hassabis keeps moving up his AGI timeline. The Nobel laureate and former Google Deepmind CEO now expects artificial general intelligence within two to three years, down from three to five years earlier this year.
Neural networks may be much easier to read than researchers assumed, with about 90 percent of neurons serving a clear function. That would be big news for AI safety research, since deception or dangerous behavior could be spotted directly in a model's circuits. Researchers are still debating whether the thesis holds up.
Last week, Anthropic and OpenAI looked like they had the AI race to themselves, pulling ahead with increasingly powerful models that left their rivals in the dust. Google seemed hopelessly far behind, while Meta, despite spending billions to revive its floundering AI ambitions, had yet to establish itself as a serious contender.
From the Bitter Lesson of AI scaling to the unsolved mysteries of protein folding, Google DeepMind’s Pushmeet Kohli and Biohub’s Sal Candido are rethinking what it takes to build AI that truly understands biology.
The story is a collaboration between MIT Technology Review and Aventine, a non-profit research foundation that creates and supports content about how technology and science are changing the way we live. A robot shaped like a human—white with a black head and torso—has been popping up on video feeds.
With AI hardware, tech companies are pushing the definition of what does and doesn't constitute a recording. For most of gadget history, it'd be reasonable to assume that a device with a microphone or camera is either recording you or it isn't; it's either on or off, without much gray area. Microphones capture sound.
Yossi Matias, Vice President & Head of Google Research, explores how AI is beginning to reshape biology, infrastructure, manufacturing, and science, and why its greatest impact may come when it intersects with other fields.
According to researchers at the Deepmind Institute, general AI won't emerge as a single supermodel but as a network of cooperating agents and humans. What will matter most, they argue, is not model size but the rules and institutions that govern how they all work together.
On an afternoon in Seoul in March 2016, I watched a program I helped build put a stone on the fifth line of a Go board in what looked like a gift to its human opponent.
"The chance of human extinction is about a coin flip, in my view," Geoffrey Irving, a former OpenAI and Google DeepMind employee, said in a new interview. It's one of a dozen interviews with AI researchers, including current and former employees at OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.
Where do you exceed the capabilities of an LLM?
MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next.
We talked to Google’s Oscar winning “Giganerd” about automating science, solving climate change, and how future generations can contribute to science in the age of superintelligent AI
When will markets price the singularity?