Author Archives: Rana Shakoor Akbar

Astronomers using AI to prepare for ton of data from new telescopes

Astronomers using AI to prepare for ton of data from new telescopes

It’s a problem that will be repeated in other places over the coming decade. As astronomers construct giant cameras to image the entire sky and launch infrared telescopes to hunt for distant planets, they will collect data on unprecedented scales.  “We really are not ready for that, and we should all be freaking out,” says […]

GPT-4o’s Chinese token-training data is polluted by spam and porn websites

GPT-4o’s Chinese token-training data is polluted by spam and porn websites

The new tokenizer has 200,000 tokens in total, and about 25% are in non-English languages, says Deedy Das, an AI investor at Menlo Ventures. He used language filters to count the number of tokens in different languages, and the top languages, besides English, are Russian, Arabic, and Vietnamese. “So the tokenizer’s main impact, in my […]

The Download: Cuddly robots to help dementia, and what Daedalus taught us

The Download: Cuddly robots to help dementia, and what Daedalus taught us

Enter cuddly robots. The most famous are Golden Pup, a robotic golden retriever toy that cocks its head, barks and wags its tail, and Paro the seal, which can sense touch, light, sound, temperature, and posture. As robots go they’re decidedly low tech, but they can provide comfort and entertainment to people with Alzheimer’s and […]

This grim but revolutionary DNA technology is changing how we respond to mass disasters

This grim but revolutionary DNA technology is changing how we respond to mass disasters

Meanwhile, after the fires, Filipino families faced particularly stark barriers to getting information about financial support, government assistance, housing, and DNA testing. Filipinos make up about 25% of Hawaii’s population and 40% of its workers in the tourism industry. They also make up 46% of undocumented residents in Hawaii—more than any other group. Some encountered […]

Technology is probably changing us for the worse—or so we always think

Technology is probably changing us for the worse—or so we always think

“Consider the mental equipment of the average modern man,” he wrote. “Most of the raw material of his thought enters his mind by way of a machine of some kind … the Twentieth Century journalist can collect, print, and distribute his news with a speed and completeness wholly due to a score or more of […]

OpenAI’s new GPT-4o lets people interact using voice or video in the same model

OpenAI’s new GPT-4o lets people interact using voice or video in the same model

GPT-4 offered similar capabilities, giving users multiple ways to interact with OpenAI’s AI offerings. But it siloed them in separate models, leading to longer response times and presumably higher computing costs. GPT-4o has now merged those capabilities into a single model, which Murati called an “omnimodel.” That means faster responses and smoother transitions between tasks, […]

AI systems are getting better at tricking us

AI systems are getting better at tricking us

The fact that an AI model has the potential to behave in a deceptive manner without any direction to do so may seem concerning. But it mostly arises from the “black box” problem that characterizes state-of-the-art machine-learning models: it is impossible to say exactly how or why they produce the results they do—or whether they’ll […]