Learning to code isn’t enough

The very existence of these training endeavors reflected a mixed set of motivations on the part of the organizers, who were mostly white, well-off volunteers. These volunteers tended to conflate living in an urban area with living in poverty, and to assume that people living in these conditions were not white, and that all such […]

Voice search, different to text search 

I’ve spent a fair bit of time in the car this last week, driving between the hospital and home a round trip of roughly 130kms. With this I’ve also needed to rely on Siri more than usual, firing of voice instructions and search criteria.  We have an Apple HomePod in the kitchen at home which […]

Will AI ever reach human-level intelligence? We asked 5 experts

Artificial intelligence has changed form in recent years. What started in the public eye as a burgeoning field with promising (yet largely benign) applications, has snowballed into a more than US$100 billion industry where the heavy hitters – Microsoft, Google and OpenAI, to name a few – seem intent on out-competing one another. The result […]

Snap is launching augmented-reality mirrors in stores

“Our goal is to have people use their time more efficiently in the world instead of getting immersed in a virtual one,” says Bobby Murphy, Snap’s chief technology officer.  The AR mirrors were first tested at the Williamsburg location of Nike in New York last fall, allowing customers to virtually try on Nike clothing and […]

Used routers often come loaded with corporate secrets

aquatarkus/Getty Images reader comments 7 with Share this story You know that you’re supposed to wipe your smartphone or laptop before you resell it or give it to your cousin. After all, there’s a lot of valuable personal data on there that should stay in your control. Businesses and other institutions need to take the […]

The Download: OpenAI’s data disaster, and screens in schools

OpenAI has just over a week to comply with European data protection laws following a temporary ban in Italy, and a slew of investigations in other EU countries. If it fails, it could face hefty fines, be forced to delete data, or even be banned. But experts have told MIT Technology Review that it will […]

OpenAI’s hunger for data is coming back to bite it

In AI development, the dominant paradigm is that the more training data, the better. OpenAI’s GPT-2 model had a data set consisting of 40 gigabytes of text. GPT-3, which ChatGPT is based on, was trained on 570 GB of data. OpenAI has not shared how big the data set for its latest model, GPT-4, is.  […]

How to teach kids who flip between book and screen

The use of digital books and textbooks exploded during the pandemic, and it may be only a matter of time before all educational publishing moves online. So it’s all the more important to keep making digital reading better for students, says literacy educator Tim Shanahan. Instead of trying to make the digital technology more like […]

GPT-4 will hunt for trends in medical records thanks to Microsoft and Epic

Enlarge / An AI-generated image of a pixel art hospital with empty windows. Benj Edwards / Midjourney reader comments 51 with Share this story On Monday, Microsoft and Epic Systems announced that they are bringing OpenAI’s GPT-4 AI language model into health care for use in drafting message responses from health care workers to patients […]