Tag Archives: artificial intelligence

What to know about this new Chinese text-to-video AI model

What to know about this new Chinese text-to-video AI model

The short-video platform, which has over 600 million active users, announced the new tool on June 6. It’s called Kling. Like OpenAI’s Sora model, Kling is able to generate videos “up to two minutes long with a frame rate of 30fps and video resolution up to 1080p,” the company says on its website. But unlike […]

This AI-powered “black-box” could make surgery safer

This AI-powered “black-box” could make surgery safer

While most algorithms operate near perfectly on their own, Peter Grantcharov explains that the OR black box is still not fully autonomous. For example, it’s difficult to capture audio through ceiling mikes and thus get a reliable transcript to document whether every element of the surgical safety checklist was completed; he estimates that this algorithm […]

An AI startup made a hyperrealistic deepfake of me that’s so good it’s scary

An AI startup made a hyperrealistic deepfake of me that’s so good it’s scary

The more data points the AI system has on facial movements, microexpressions, head tilts, blinks, shrugs, and hand waves, the more realistic the avatar will be. DAVID VINTINER He then asks me to read a script for a fictitious YouTuber in different tones, directing me on the spectrum of emotions I should convey. First I’m […]

Why shiny, high-tech solutions won’t solve one of Africa’s worst crises

Why shiny, high-tech solutions won’t solve one of Africa’s worst crises

Hainikoye hits Accept and a young woman greets him in Hausa, a gravelly language spoken across West Africa’s Sahel region. She has three new cows, and wants to know: Does he have advice on getting them through the lean season? Hainikoye—a twentysomething agronomist who has “followed animals,” as Sahelians refer to herding, since he first […]

How machine learning might improve earthquake prediction

How machine learning might improve earthquake prediction

Instances of regular intervals between earthquakes of similar magnitudes have been noted in other places, including Hawaii, but these are the exception, not the rule. Far more often, recurrence intervals are given as averages with large margins of error. For areas prone to large earthquakes, these intervals can be on the scale of hundreds of […]

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 […]

The EU wants to put companies on the hook for harmful AI

The EU wants to put companies on the hook for harmful AI

The new bill, called the AI Liability Directive, will add teeth to the EU’s AI Act, which is set to become EU law around the same time. The AI Act would require extra checks for “high risk” uses of AI that have the most potential to harm people, including systems for policing, recruitment, or health […]

What the history of AI tells us about its future

What the history of AI tells us about its future

But what computers were bad at, traditionally, was strategy—the ability to ponder the shape of a game many, many moves in the future. That’s where humans still had the edge.  Or so Kasparov thought, until Deep Blue’s move in game 2 rattled him. It seemed so sophisticated that Kasparov began worrying: maybe the machine was […]

This AI could predict 10 years of scientific priorities—if we let it

The survey committee, which receives input from a host of smaller panels, takes into account a gargantuan amount of information to create research strategies. Although the Academies won’t release the committee’s final recommendation to NASA for a few more weeks, scientists are itching to know which of their questions will make it in, and which will be […]