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☆ Google Unveils A.I. for Predicting Behavior of Human Molecules
▼ + stars: | 2024-05-08 | by ( Cade Metz | More About Cade Metz | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Artificial intelligence is giving machines the power to generate videos, write computer code and even carry on a conversation. It is also accelerating efforts to understand the human body and fight disease. An early version of AlphaFold, released in 2020, solved a puzzle that had bedeviled scientists for more than 50 years. It was called “the protein folding problem.”Proteins are the microscopic molecules that drive the behavior of all living things. These molecules begin as strings of chemical compounds before twisting and folding into three-dimensional shapes that define how they interact with other microscopic mechanisms in the body.

Organizations: Google

As experts warn that images, audio and video generated by artificial intelligence could influence the fall elections, OpenAI is releasing a tool designed to detect content created by its own popular image generator, DALL-E. start-up acknowledges that this tool is only a small part of what will be needed to fight so-called deepfakes in the months and years to come. On Tuesday, OpenAI said it would share its new deepfake detector with a small group of disinformation researchers so they could test the tool in real-world situations and help pinpoint ways it could be improved. “This is to kick-start new research,” said Sandhini Agarwal, an OpenAI researcher who focuses on safety and policy. “That is really needed.”

Persons: OpenAI, ”, Sandhini Agarwal

☆ Even as He Faces Prison Time, Binance’s Founder Plans a Comeback
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-30 | by ( David Yaffe-Bellany | Cade Metz | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

And he chatted about start-ups with Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI. After pleading guilty to a money-laundering violation in November, Changpeng Zhao, the founder of the cryptocurrency exchange Binance, did not sit still. A federal judge denied his request to return home to Dubai, but Mr. Zhao, 47, was free to roam the United States. When he pleaded guilty, Mr. Zhao, once the most powerful figure in the global crypto industry, resigned as Binance’s chief executive and agreed to pay a $50 million fine. But Mr. Zhao, who goes by the initials CZ, is already looking to the future.

Persons: Sam Altman, Changpeng Zhao, Zhao, Forbes Organizations: OpenAI Locations: Montana, U.S, Telluride, Colo, Moab , Utah, Dubai, United States, Seattle

is an investigative reporter at The Times, writing about public corruption. He has been covering the various criminal investigations into former President Trump and his allies.

Persons: Trump Organizations: The Times

Since mid-March, the financial pressure on several signature artificial intelligence start-ups has taken a toll. Inflection AI, which raised $1.5 billion but made almost no money, has folded its original business. Stability AI has laid off employees and parted ways with its chief executive. And Anthropic has raced to close the roughly $1.8 billion gap between its modest sales and enormous expenses. “You can already see the writing on the wall,” said Ali Ghodsi, chief executive of Databricks, a data warehouse and analysis company that works with A.I.

Persons: Anthropic, ”, Ali Ghodsi Organizations: Google, Microsoft, Meta, A.I Locations: Silicon Valley

☆ Friends From the Old Neighborhood Turn Rivals in Big Tech’s A.I. Race
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-29 | by ( Cade Metz | Nico Grant | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Today, they are two of the most powerful executives in the tech industry’s race to build artificial intelligence. Dr. Hassabis, 47, is the chief executive of Google DeepMind, the tech giant’s central research lab for artificial intelligence. Mr. Suleyman, 39, was recently named chief executive of Microsoft AI, charged with overseeing the company’s push into A.I. In 2010, they were two of the three founders of DeepMind, a seminal A.I. research lab that was supposed to prevent the very thing they are now deeply involved in: an escalating race by profit-driven companies to build and deploy A.I.

Persons: Mustafa Suleyman, Hassabis, Demis, —, Suleyman Organizations: National Health Service, Queen Elizabeth’s, Google, Microsoft, Big Tech, DeepMind Locations: Syrian, Cypriot, London

☆ Microsoft Makes a New Push Into Smaller A.I. Systems
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-23 | by ( Karen Weise | Cade Metz | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

systems, the tech industry’s mantra has been bigger is better, no matter the price tag. Now tech companies are starting to embrace smaller A.I. On Tuesday, Microsoft introduced three smaller A.I. The smallest Phi-3 model can fit on a smartphone, so it can be used even if it’s not connected to the internet. And it can run on the kinds of chips that power regular computers, rather than more expensive processors made by Nvidia.

Organizations: Microsoft, Phi, Nvidia

☆ Generative A.I. Arrives in the Gene Editing World of CRISPR
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-22 | by ( Cade Metz | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Generative A.I. technologies can write poetry and computer programs or create images of teddy bears and videos of cartoon characters that look like something from a Hollywood movie. Now, new A.I. The company is expected to present the paper next month at the annual meeting of the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy. Much as ChatGPT learns to generate language by analyzing Wikipedia articles, books and chat logs, Profluent’s technology creates new gene editors after analyzing enormous amounts of biological data, including microscopic mechanisms that scientists already use to edit human DNA.

Persons: ChatGPT Organizations: American Society of Gene, Cell Locations: Berkeley, Calif

☆ Meta, in Its Biggest A.I. Push, Places Smart Assistants Across Its Apps
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-18 | by ( Mike Isaac | Cade Metz | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

On a call with investors last spring, Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, said he believed that he had an opportunity to introduce artificially intelligent assistants “to billions of people in ways that will be useful and meaningful.”A year later, he is making good on his statement. On Thursday, Meta will begin incorporating new versions of its A.I.-powered smart assistant software across its apps, which include Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Facebook. The latest technology will be rolled out in more than a dozen countries, including Australia, Canada, Singapore and the United States. software will become practically omnipresent — inside the news feed, in search bars and in chats with friends. People will be able to ask the assistant, Meta A.I., for help in completing tasks and getting information, such as what concerts might be occurring in San Francisco on a Saturday night or the best options for vegan enchiladas in New York.

Persons: Mark Zuckerberg, Meta, Meta A.I Organizations: Meta, Facebook Locations: Australia, Canada, Singapore, United States, San Francisco, New York

Listen and follow The DailyApple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicA Times investigation shows how the country’s biggest technology companies, as they raced to build powerful new artificial intelligence systems, bent and broke the rules from the start. Cade Metz, a technology reporter for The Times, explains what he uncovered.

Persons: Cade Metz Organizations: Spotify, Times, The Times

☆ Computer Theorist Wins $1 Million Turing Award
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-11 | by ( Cade Metz | More About Cade Metz | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

On Wednesday, the Association for Computing Machinery, the world’s largest society of computing professionals, announced that this year’s Turing Award will go to Avi Wigderson, an Israeli-born mathematician and theoretical computer scientist who specializes in randomness. Often called the Nobel Prize of computing, the Turing Award comes with a $1 million prize. The award is named for Alan Turing, the British mathematician who helped create the foundations for modern computing in the mid-20th century. Other recent winners include Ed Catmull and Pat Hanrahan, who helped create the computer-generated imagery, or C.G.I., that drives modern movies and television, and the A.I. researchers Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio, who nurtured the techniques that gave rise to chatbots like ChatGPT.

Persons: Turing, Avi Wigderson, Alan Turing, Ed Catmull, Pat Hanrahan, Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio Organizations: Association for Computing Machinery Locations: Israeli, British

Online data has long been a valuable commodity. For years, Meta and Google have used data to target their online advertising. Political candidates have turned to data to learn which groups of voters to train their sights on. Over the last 18 months, it has become increasingly clear that digital data is also crucial in the development of artificial intelligence. models become more accurate and more humanlike with more data.

Persons: — Organizations: Meta, Google, Netflix, Spotify

The artificial intelligence lab had exhausted every reservoir of reputable English-language text on the internet as it developed its latest A.I. It could transcribe the audio from YouTube videos, yielding new conversational text that would make an A.I. Ultimately, an OpenAI team transcribed more than one million hours of YouTube videos, the people said. The texts were then fed into a system called GPT-4, which was widely considered one of the world’s most powerful A.I. models and was the basis of the latest version of the ChatGPT chatbot.

Persons: OpenAI, Greg Brockman Organizations: YouTube, Google

☆ What to Know About Tech Companies Using A.I. to Teach Their Own A.I.
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-06 | by ( Cade Metz | Stuart A. Thompson | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

OpenAI, Google and other tech companies train their chatbots with huge amounts of data culled from books, Wikipedia articles, news stories and other sources across the internet. That’s because tech companies may exhaust the high-quality text the internet has to offer for the development of artificial intelligence. Does that mean tech companies want A.I. Rather than training A.I. models with text written by people, tech companies like Google, OpenAI and Anthropic hope to train their technology with data generated by other A.I.

Persons: OpenAI, A.I Organizations: Google, The New York Times, Microsoft

☆ An A.I. Researcher Takes On Election Deepfakes
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-02 | by ( Cade Metz | Tiffany Hsu | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

For nearly 30 years, Oren Etzioni was among the most optimistic of artificial intelligence researchers. But in 2019 Dr. Etzioni, a University of Washington professor and founding chief executive of the Allen Institute for A.I., became one of the first researchers to warn that a new breed of A.I. And by the middle of last year, he said, he was distressed that A.I.-generated deepfakes would swing a major election. He founded a nonprofit, TrueMedia.org in January, hoping to fight that threat. The tools, available from the TrueMedia.org website to anyone approved by the nonprofit, are designed to detect fake and doctored images, audio and video.

Persons: Oren Etzioni, Etzioni Organizations: University of Washington, Allen Institute for A.I, TrueMedia.org

☆ OpenAI Unveils A.I. Technology That Recreates Human Voices
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-29 | by ( Cade Metz | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

First, OpenAI offered a tool that allowed people to create digital images simply by describing what they wanted to see. Then, it built similar technology that generated full-motion video like something from a Hollywood movie. Now, it has unveiled technology that can recreate someone’s voice. start-up said on Friday that a small group of businesses was testing a new OpenAI system, Voice Engine, that can recreate a person’s voice from a 15-second recording. If you are an English speaker, for example, it can recreate your voice in Spanish, French, Chinese or many other languages.

Persons: OpenAI

☆ In Latest A.I. War Escalation, Elon Musk Releases Chatbot Code
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-17 | by ( Kate Conger | Cade Metz | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Elon Musk released the raw computer code behind his version of an artificial intelligence chatbot on Sunday, an escalation by one of the world’s richest men in a battle to control the future of A.I. Grok, which is designed to give snarky replies styled after the science-fiction novel “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” is a product from xAI, the company Mr. Musk founded last year. While xAI is an independent entity from X, its technology has been integrated into the social media platform and is trained on users’ posts. By opening the code up for everyone to view and use — known as open sourcing — Mr. Musk waded further into a heated debate in the A.I. Mr. Musk, a self-proclaimed proponent of open sourcing, did the same with X’s recommendation algorithm last year, but he has not updated it since.

Persons: Elon Musk, snarky, Musk Organizations: Galaxy Locations: xAI

Companies like OpenAI and Midjourney build chatbots, image generators and other artificial intelligence tools that operate in the digital world. Now, a start-up founded by three former OpenAI researchers is using the technology development methods behind chatbots to build A.I. technology that can navigate the physical world. Its goal is to help robots gain an understanding of what is going on around them and decide what they should do next. The technology also gives robots a broad understanding of the English language, letting people chat with them as if they were chatting with ChatGPT.

Locations: Emeryville, Calif

OpenAI said on Friday that Sam Altman, its high-profile chief executive, would rejoin its board of directors more than three months after he was briefly pushed out of the company. The move caps a highly anticipated report by a law firm hired by OpenAI’s board of directors to investigate Mr. Altman and his sudden removal from the company in November. “The special committee recommended and the full board expressed their full confidence in Mr. Altman and Mr. Brockman,” Mr. Taylor said, referring to Greg Brockman, the company president who quit in protest after Mr. Altman was removed. “We are excited and unanimous in our support for Sam and Greg.”The company said that the report found that OpenAI’s board acted within its broad discretion to terminate Mr. Altman, but also found that his conduct did not mandate removal. Mr. Taylor said the company would continue to expand its board.

Persons: OpenAI, Sam Altman, Altman, Bret Taylor, . Brockman, ” Mr, Taylor, Greg Brockman, Greg, ”

☆ Dozens of Top Scientists Sign Effort to Prevent A.I. Bioweapons
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-08 | by ( Cade Metz | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Dario Amodei, chief executive of the high-profile A.I. start-up Anthropic, told Congress last year that new A.I. technology could soon help unskilled but malevolent people create large-scale biological attacks, such as the release of viruses or toxic substances that cause widespread disease and death. Senators from both parties were alarmed, while A.I. Now, over 90 biologists and other scientists who specialize in A.I.

Persons: Dario Amodei, Frances Arnold Locations: United States

☆ OpenAI Says Elon Musk Tried To Merge It With Tesla
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-05 | by ( Cade Metz | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

OpenAI, in its first public comments about Elon Musk’s lawsuit against the influential artificial intelligence research lab, said that Mr. Musk tried to transform the lab from a nonprofit into a for-profit operation before he left the company in early 2018. The comments, made in a blog post published on Tuesday evening, are part of an escalating feud between Mr. Musk and OpenAI, which is now at the forefront of an industrywide A.I. The company said it intended to move to dismiss all the claims in Mr. Musk’s suit. Mr. Musk filed the suit against OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, on Friday, accusing them of breaching a contract by putting profits and commercial interests ahead of building A.I. (The New York Times sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, in December, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I.

Persons: Elon, Musk, Musk’s, Sam Altman, OpenAI Organizations: OpenAI, Microsoft, New York Times

Microsoft filed a motion in federal court on Monday that seeks to dismiss parts of a lawsuit brought by The New York Times Company. The Times sued Microsoft and its partner OpenAI on Dec. 27, accusing the two companies of infringing on its copyrights by using its articles to train A.I. In its motion, filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, Microsoft argued that large language models, or L.L.M.s — the technologies that drive chatbots — did not supplant the market for news articles and other materials they were trained on. The tech giant compared L.L.M.s to videocassette recorders, arguing that both are allowed under the law. than it was to the VCR (or the player piano, copy machine, personal computer, internet or search engine),” the motion read.

Persons: OpenAI Organizations: Microsoft, The New York Times Company, The Times, Southern, of Locations: U.S, of New York

☆ A.I. Start-Up Anthropic Challenges OpenAI and Google With New Chatbot
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-04 | by ( Cade Metz | More About Cade Metz | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

start-up Anthropic released a new version of its Claude chatbot on Monday, saying it outperforms other leading chatbots on a range of standard benchmark tests, including systems from Google and OpenAI. Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s chief executive and co-founder, said the new technology, called Claude 3 Opus, was particularly useful when analyzing scientific data or generating computer code. Anthropic is among a small group of companies at the forefront of generative A.I., technology that instantly creates text, images and sounds. Dr. Amodei and other Anthropic founders helped pioneer the technology while working as researchers at OpenAI, the start-up that launched the generative A.I. Chatbots like ChatGPT can answer questions, write term papers, generate small computer programs and more.

Persons: Anthropic, Claude chatbot, Dario Amodei, Claude, Opus, Amodei Organizations: Google, OpenAI

☆ Why Elon Musk’s OpenAI Lawsuit Leans on A.I. Research From Microsoft
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-02 | by ( Karen Weise | Cade Metz | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

When Elon Musk sued OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, for breach of contract on Thursday, he turned claims by the start-up’s closest partner, Microsoft, into a weapon. He repeatedly cited a contentious but highly influential paper written by researchers and top executives at Microsoft about the power of GPT-4, the breakthrough artificial intelligence system OpenAI released last March. In the “Sparks of A.G.I.” paper, Microsoft’s research lab said that — though it didn’t understand how — GPT-4 had shown “sparks” of “artificial general intelligence,” or A.G.I., a machine that can do everything the human brain can do. It was a bold claim, and came as the biggest tech companies in the world were racing to introduce A.I. into their own products.

Persons: Elon Musk, OpenAI, Sam Altman Organizations: Microsoft Locations: A.G.I

☆ OpenAI Seeks to Dismiss Parts of The New York Times’s Lawsuit
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-27 | by ( Cade Metz | Katie Robertson | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

OpenAI filed a motion in federal court on Monday that seeks to dismiss some key elements of a lawsuit brought by The New York Times Company. The Times sued OpenAI and its partner Microsoft on Dec. 27, accusing them of infringing on its copyrights by using millions of its articles to train A.I. technologies like the online chatbot ChatGPT. Chatbots now compete with the news outlet as a source of reliable information, the lawsuit said. In the ordinary course, one cannot use ChatGPT to serve up Times articles at will.”

Persons: OpenAI, Chatbots, ” “, “, ” Organizations: The New York Times Company, The Times, Microsoft, Southern, of, New York Times Locations: U.S, of New York

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