Tag Archives: AI

Google DeepMind’s new AI tool helped create more than 700 new materials

Google DeepMind’s new AI tool helped create more than 700 new materials

GNoME can be described as AlphaFold for materials discovery, according to Ju Li, a materials science and engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. AlphaFold, a DeepMind AI system announced in 2020, predicts the structures of proteins with high accuracy and has since advanced biological research and drug discovery. Thanks to GNoME, the number […]

battery recycling, and how AI might revamp Microsoft Office

battery recycling, and how AI might revamp Microsoft Office

Microsoft is reportedly eyeing a $10 billion investment in OpenAI, the startup that created the viral chatbot ChatGPT, and is planning to integrate it into Office products and Bing search. This is a big deal. If successful, it will bring powerful AI tools to the masses. So what would ChatGPT-powered Microsoft products look like? While […]

AI is bringing the internet underwater to submerged Roman ruins

AI is bringing the internet underwater to submerged Roman ruins

Cabled systems are the most reliable, but they are difficult to maintain and cover a limited operational area. And wireless internet doesn’t work well in water, because of the way water interacts with electromagnetic waves. Scientists have tried optic and acoustic waves, but light and sound aren’t efficient forms of wireless underwater communication—water temperature, salinity, […]

Circumventing China’s firewall, and using AI to invent new drugs

Circumventing China’s firewall, and using AI to invent new drugs

As protests against rigid covid control measures in China engulfed social media in the past week, one Twitter account has emerged as the central source of information: @李老师不是你老师 (“Teacher Li Is Not Your Teacher”).  People everywhere in China have sent protest footage and real-time updates to the account through private messages, and it has posted […]

The Download: climate responsibility, and AI training data shortages

The Download: climate responsibility, and AI training data shortages

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. The US and China are pointing fingers at each other over climate change The UN climate conference wrapped up over the weekend after marathon negotiations that ran way over. The most notable outcome was the […]

Alex Hanna left Google to try and save AI’s future

Alex Hanna left Google to try and save AI’s future

It was a move that capped a dramatic period in Hanna’s professional life. In late 2020, her manager, Timnit Gebru, had been fired from her position as the co-lead of the Ethical AI team after she wrote a paper questioning the ethics of large language models (including Google’s). A few months later, Hanna’s next manager, […]

How AI could be used to make life and death decisions

How AI could be used to make life and death decisions

By the 2000s, an algorithm had been developed in the US to identify recipients for donated kidneys. But some people were unhappy with how the algorithm had been designed. In 2007, Clive Grawe, a kidney transplant candidate from Los Angeles, told a room full of medical experts that their algorithm was biased against older people […]

TikTok’s parent company’s new app reportedly pushed pro-China messaging to Americans

TikTok’s parent company’s new app reportedly pushed pro-China messaging to Americans

When Liu Yang started his current job, he found it hard to go back to driving his own car: “I instinctively went for the passenger seat. Or when I was driving, I would expect the car to brake by itself,” says the 33-year-old Beijing native, who joined the Chinese tech giant Baidu in January 2021 […]

Apple’s new government spyware-thwarting security feature

Apple’s new government spyware-thwarting security feature

Exactly two weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine in February, Alexander Karp, the CEO of data analytics company Palantir, made his pitch to European leaders. With war on their doorstep, Europeans ought to modernize their arsenals with Silicon Valley’s help, he argued in an open letter. Militaries are responding to the call. NATO announced on June […]

The Large Hadron Collider has helped scientists to discover three never-before-seen particles

The Large Hadron Collider has helped scientists to discover three never-before-seen particles

What’s the news?: Deep learning is behind machine learning’s most high-profile successes. But this incredible performance comes at a cost: training deep-learning models requires huge amounts of energy. Now, new research shows how scientists who use cloud platforms to train algorithms can dramatically reduce the energy they use, and therefore the emissions they create. How […]