We’ve all been astonished at how chatbots seem to understand the world. But what if they were truly connect to the real world? What if the dataset behind the chat interface was physical reality itself, captured in real time by interpreting the input of billions of sensors sprinkled around the …
Read More »Google DeepMind’s AI Weather Forecaster Handily Beats a Global Standard
In September, researchers at Google’s DeepMind AI unit in London were paying unusual attention to the weather across the pond. Hurricane Lee was at least 10 days out from landfall—eons in forecasting terms—and official forecasts were still waffling between the storm landing on major Northeast cities or missing them entirely. …
Read More »AI Is Becoming More Powerful—but Also More Secretive
When OpenAI published details of the stunningly capable AI language model GPT-4, which powers ChatGPT, in March, its researchers filled 100 pages. They also left out a few important details—like anything substantial about how it was actually built or how it works. That was no accidental oversight, of course. OpenAI …
Read More »DeepMind Wants to Use AI to Solve the Climate Crisis
It’s a perennial question at WIRED: Tech got us into this mess, can it get us out? That’s particularly true when it comes to climate change. As the weather becomes more extreme and unpredictable, there are hopes that artificial intelligence—that other existential threat—might be part of the solution. DeepMind, the …
Read More »AI Chatbots Can Guess Your Personal Information From What You Type
The way you talk can reveal a lot about you—especially if you're talking to a chatbot. New research reveals that chatbots like ChatGPT can infer a lot of sensitive information about the people they chat with, even if the conversation is utterly mundane. The phenomenon appears to stem from the …
Read More »Scientists Have an Audacious Plan to Map the Ancient World Before It Disappears
In the center of Siena, Italy, a cathedral has stood for nearly 800 years. A black-and-white layer cake of heavy stone, fine-cut statuary, and rich mosaics, the imposing structure—now visited by more than a million tourists each year—would seem to be a permanent fixture of the city’s past, present, and …
Read More »Scientists Say You’re Looking for Alien Civilizations All Wrong
An influential group of researchers is making the case for new ways to search the skies for signs of alien societies. They argue that current methods could be biased by human-centered thinking, and that it’s time to take advantage of data-driven, machine learning techniques. The team of 22 scientists released …
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