For the past decade, AI researcher Chris Olah has been obsessed with artificial neural networks. One question in particular engaged him, and has been the center of his work, first at Google Brain, then OpenAI, and today at AI startup Anthropic, where he is a cofounder. “What's going on inside …
Read More »Inside the Creation of the World’s Most Powerful Open Source AI Model
This past Monday, about a dozen engineers and executives at data science and AI company Databricks gathered in conference rooms connected via Zoom to learn if they had succeeded in building a top artificial intelligence language model. The team had spent months, and about $10 million, training DBRX, a large …
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 »A Groundbreaking Human Brain Cell Atlas Just Dropped
Today, an international team of researchers shared an extraordinarily detailed atlas of human brain cells, mapping its staggering diversity of neurons. The atlas was published as part of a massive package of 21 papers in the journal Science, each taking complementary approaches to the same overarching questions: What cell types …
Read More »Don't Count on Tesla's Dojo Supercomputer to Jump-Start an AI Revolution
You’d have to be pretty brave to bet against the idea that applying more computing power and data to machine learning—a recipe that birthed ChatGPT—won’t lead to further advances of some kind in artificial intelligence. Even so, you’d be braver still to bet that combo will produce specific advances or …
Read More »AI Can’t Read Books. It’s Reviewing Them Anyway
Now that we’ve all had experience with large language models, their limitations are all too visible. Yes, they can write. But their prose doesn’t explode in the mind like the words of Jennifer Egan, Emily St. John Mandel, or David Foster Wallace do. Yes they can make music. But Taylor …
Read More »The ‘Godfather of AI’ Has a Hopeful Plan for Keeping Future AI Friendly
Geoffrey Hinton, perhaps the world’s most celebrated artificial intelligence researcher, made a big splash a few months ago when he publicly revealed that he’d left Google so he could speak frankly about the dangers of the technology he helped develop. His announcement did not come out of the blue. Late …
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