Generative artificial intelligence (AI) possesses great potential but equally great risks if misused or overestimated, warned Rodney Brooks, co-founder of iRobot, at MIT’s "Generative AI: Shaping the Future" symposium. The event kicked off the university's Generative AI Week on 28 November and attracted hundreds of academia and industry representatives to the institution's Kresge Auditorium. Generative…
The logistics of delivering holiday packages by companies such as FedEx requires specialized software for efficient routing, given the immense complexity of the optimization problem. The software currently in use, known as a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) solver, often takes days to arrive at a solution, and even then, the companies have to accept solutions…
At the “Generative AI: Shaping the Future” symposium held on Nov. 28, Rodney Brooks, iRobot co-founder and a keynote speaker, cautioned attendees against overestimating the capabilities of generative AI. Noting that “No one technology has ever surpassed everything else”, Brooks stressed that flippant assumptions about the inferred abilities of generative AI could lead to failure.…
In the age of artificial intelligence, computers can generate "art" using diffusion models. However, this often involves a complex, time-consuming process requiring multiple iterations for the algorithm to perfect the image. MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) researchers have now launched a new technique that simplifies this process into a single step using…
A team of researchers from MIT, Harvard University, and the University of Washington have developed a novel reinforcement learning technique using crowdsourced feedback. The technique allows AI to learn complex tasks more quickly and without relying on an expertly designed reward function. The conventional reward function designed by dedicated human experts has been replaced by…
MIT's Generative AI Week began with a symposium on November 28, titled “Generative AI: Shaping the Future”. The keynote speaker was Rodney Brooks, co-founder of iRobot and former director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT.
During his address, Brooks cautioned against overestimating the capabilities of generative AI, which forms the basis…
Reinforcement learning, which involves teaching an AI agent a new task using a trial and error methodology, often requires the assistance of a human expert to create and modify the reward function. However, this can be time-consuming, inefficient and difficult to upscale, particularly when the task is highly complex and involves several stages. In response…
In a keynote address at MIT's Generative AI Week on November 28, iRobot co-founder Rodney Brooks highlighted the potential dangers of overestimating the capabilities of generative AI, an emerging technology that supports powerful tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard. He urged that while the technology has significant capabilities, the illusion that it can solve…
Researchers from MIT, Harvard, and the University of Washington have developed a new method for training AI agents using reinforcement learning. Their approach replaces a process often involving a time-consuming design of a reward function by a human expert with feedback crowdsourced from non-expert users.
Traditionally, AI reinforcement learning has used a reward function, designed by…
At the Generative AI: Shaping the Future symposium, Rodney Brooks, keynote speaker and co-founder of iRobot, cautioned against overestimating the capabilities of Generative AI. The technology supports powerful tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard, but Brooks argued that no single technology ever exceeds all others. He stressed the importance of responsible development and use…
Teaching AI agents new tasks can be a challenging and time-consuming process, often involving iteratively updating a reward function designed by a human expert to motivate the AI’s exploration of possible actions. However, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, and the University of Washington have developed a new reinforcement learning approach that…
In a recent symposium titled "Generative AI: Shaping the Future", iRobot co-founder Rodney Brooks urged caution regarding the unbridled optimism around generative artificial intelligence (AI). Generative AI uses machine-learning models to generate new material similar to the data it has been trained on, and has proven capable of creative writing, translation, generating code, and creating…