News on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

  • In the 'Wild West' of AI chatbots, subtle biases related to race and caste often go unchecked
    on November 20, 2024 at 7:51 pm

    Recently, LinkedIn announced its Hiring Assistant, an artificial intelligence "agent" that performs the most repetitious parts of recruiters' jobs—including interacting with job candidates before and after interviews. LinkedIn's bot is the highest-profile example in a growing group of tools—such as Tombo.ai and Moonhub.ai—that deploy large language models to interact with job seekers.

  • Could pedestrian crashes and their severity be estimated without using actual crash data?
    on November 20, 2024 at 7:30 pm

    Devising countermeasures for improving pedestrian safety, especially targeted measures for severe and non-severe crashes, is crucial for road authorities. However, such efforts predominantly rely on police-reported crash data, facing obvious and ethical issues and hindering proactive safety management.

  • Real-world chemists are more diverse than generative AI images suggest
    on November 20, 2024 at 6:13 pm

    Asking children "What does a scientist look like?" now results in more illustrations of women and people of color than decades ago. But do generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools also depict the diversity among scientists? Researchers reporting in the Journal of Chemical Education prompted AI image generators for portraits of chemists. They found that none of the collections accurately represents the gender, racial or disability diversity among real chemists today.

  • The cognitive research behind AI's rise
    on November 20, 2024 at 2:38 pm

    Federal funding for cognitive research in the late 1970s and early 1980s unexpectedly led to significant advancements in artificial intelligence. This research transformed our understanding of human cognition through computational models and also laid the groundwork for the deep learning systems driving today's AI technology.

  • Microsoft pitches AI 'agents' that can perform tasks on their own at Ignite 2024
    on November 20, 2024 at 9:32 am

    Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told customers at a conference in Chicago on Tuesday that the company is teaching a new set of artificial intelligence tools how to "act on our behalf across our work and life."

  • Four ways the metaverse and AI are transforming history and religion
    on November 19, 2024 at 10:00 pm

    Imagine having a live art class taught by Leonardo da Vinci, or having a fully interactive discussion about the meaning of life with Socrates. You can now do this in your living room with a laptop and headset through startups like Ireland's Engage XR and Sweden's Hello History, combining the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) and the metaverse.

  • Will politicians and terrorist leaders live forever in the age of AI?
    on November 19, 2024 at 8:49 pm

    Yahya Sinwar, the former leader of the Hamas militant organization, was killed by the Israeli military in the south Gazan city of Rafah in October 2024. Given the role Sinwar played in the planning and execution of the October 7 terrorist attack, as well as his role in the development of Hamas's military wing, his killing was seen as a possibly game-changing victory for the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

  • Researchers explore how to bring larger neural networks closer to the energy efficiency of biological brains
    on November 19, 2024 at 7:11 pm

    The more lottery tickets you buy, the higher your chances of winning, but spending more than you win is obviously not a wise strategy. Something similar happens in AI powered by deep learning: we know that the larger a neural network is (i.e., the more parameters it has), the better it can learn the task we set for it.

  • An 83-year-old short story by Borges portends a bleak future for the internet
    on November 19, 2024 at 6:02 pm

    How will the internet evolve in the coming decades?

  • Leaner large language models could enable efficient local use on phones and laptops
    on November 18, 2024 at 10:38 pm

    Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly automating tasks like translation, text classification and customer service. But tapping into an LLM's power typically requires users to send their requests to a centralized server—a process that's expensive, energy-intensive and often slow.