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…
Researchers at MIT, Harvard, and the University of Washington have shunned traditional reinforcement learning approaches, using crowdsourced feedback to teach artificial intelligence (AI) new skills instead. Traditional methods to teach AI tasks often required a reward function, which was updated and managed by a human expert. This limited scalability and was often time-consuming, particularly if…
During the kickoff event of MIT’s Generative AI Week, the “Generative AI: Shaping the Future” symposium, Rodney Brooks, co-founder of iRobot, cautioned attendees about the dangers of overestimating the capabilities of generative AI technology. Brooks, also a professor emeritus at MIT and former director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), warned that…
Five MIT researchers—Michael Birnbaum, Regina Barzilay, Brandon DeKosky, Seychelle Vos, and Ömer Yilmaz—are part of winning teams for Cancer Grand Challenges 2024. Each team, made up of international, interdisciplinary cancer researchers, will receive $25 million over five years.
Associate Professor of Biological Engineering Michael Birnbaum is heading Team MATCHMAKERS, comprised of co-investigators Regina Barzilay (Engineering Distinguished…
MIT researchers have developed an algorithm called FeatUp that enables computer vision algorithms to capture both high-level details and fine-grained minutiae of a scene simultaneously. Modern computer vision algorithms, like human beings, can only recall the broad details of a scene while the more nuanced specifics are often lost. To understand an image, they break…
Audio deepfakes, although often associated with unethical practices, have potential uses that can benefit society, suggests postdoc Nauman Dawalatabad in a Q&A with MIT News. He highlights the need for technology that protects sensitive information held within speech patterns, such as age, gender, and health conditions, stating that obscuring the speaker's identity in audio deepfakes…
Researchers at MIT have developed an image dataset that simulates peripheral vision for use in training machine learning (ML) models, an area where artificial intelligence (AI) notably diverges from human ability. Humans leverage less-detailed peripheral vision to detect shapes and items outside their direct line of sight, an ability AI lacks. Incorporating aspects of peripheral…
Machine learning models are widely used today in smart devices like smartphones, with diverse applications like autocorrecting keyboards or improved chatbot responses. However, fine-tuning these models requires considerable computational resources and transfers of data to and from cloud servers – which can pose both energy and security issues. The team of researchers from MIT and…
The "Generative AI: Shaping the Future" symposium, the kickoff event of MIT’s Generative AI Week, drew hundreds of attendees both from academia and industry. Rodney Brooks, iRobot co-founder and keynote speaker, warned attendees against uncritically overestimating the capabilities of generative AI, a technology increasingly powering tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard.
Generative AI…