This self-driving startup is using generative AI to predict traffic
While autonomous driving has long relied on machine learning to plan routes and detect objects, some companies and researchers are...
The Download: Africa’s AI regulation push, and how to fight denge
In Tanzania, farmers are using an AI-assisted app that works in their native language of Swahili to detect a devastating...
Africa’s push to regulate AI starts now
In February, just before the AU’s AI policy draft came out, Shikoh Gitau, a computer scientist who started the Nairobi-based...
Brazil is fighting dengue with bacteria-infected mosquitos
The World Mosquito Program is about to start construction on a mass rearing facility—the biggest in the world—in Curitiba. “And...
Decarbonizing production of energy is a quick win
Mr. Mussabeh Al Kaabi: Hydrogen and CCS offer great promise, but, like any other transformative technology, they require R&D attention,...
The Download: AI’s gaming prowess, and calculating methane emissions
The news: A new AI agent from Google DeepMind can play different games, including ones it has never seen before...
Why methane emissions are still a mystery
The key is contrails, thin clouds that planes produce when they fly. Minimizing contrails means less warming, and changing flight...
Methane leaks in the US are worse than we thought
Methane emissions are responsible for nearly a third of the total warming the planet has experienced so far. While there...
An AI that can play Goat Simulator is a step toward more useful machines
In training AI systems, games are a good proxy for real-world tasks. “A general game-playing agent could, in principle, learn...
The Download: what social media can teach us about AI
June 2023 Astronomy should, in principle, be a welcoming field for blind researchers. But across the board, science is full...
Let’s not make the same mistakes with AI that we made with social media
The reason for these outcomes is structural. The network effects of tech platforms push a few firms to become dominant,...
The Download: hacking VR headsets, and contrails to cool the planet
How it works: Jets release heat, water vapor, and particulate matter that can produce thin clouds in the sky, known...
Building a data-driven health-care ecosystem
To spark innovation by identifying gaps and pain points in the employer-based health-care system, JPMorgan Chase launched Morgan Health in...
Why we need better defenses against VR cyberattacks
I just published a story about a new kind of security vulnerability discovered by researchers at the University of Chicago. Inspired by...
How rerouting planes to produce fewer contrails could help cool the planet
For one thing, Barrett says, researchers still need to test, refine, and engineer systems that can reliably predict, with enough...
LLMs become more covertly racist with human intervention
Even when the two sentences had the same meaning, the models were more likely to apply adjectives like “dirty,” “lazy,”...
VR headsets can be hacked with an Inception-style attack
In the attack, hackers create an app that injects malicious code into the Meta Quest VR system and then launch...
The Download: rise of the multimodal robots, and the SEC’s new climate rules
The news: In the summer of 2021, OpenAI quietly shuttered its mulrobotics team, announcing that progress was being stifled by...
An OpenAI spinoff has built an AI model that helps robots learn tasks like humans
The new model, called RFM-1, was trained on years of data collected from Covariant’s small fleet of item-picking robots that...
A.I. Is Learning What It Means to Be Alive
In 1889, a French doctor named Francois-Gilbert Viault climbed down from a mountain in the Andes, drew blood from his...