Category: Featured articles

“. . . my confidence that this wasn’t coming for quite a while has been shaken by the realisation that biological intelligence and digital intelligence are very different, and digital intelligence is probably much better.” Geoffrey Hinton Neural network pioneer…

In his own words, the “Godfather of AI” describes his change of heart about the technology he helped create. Many leading figures in current AI research are former students of Geoffrey Hinton, and his life’s work has produced foundational advances…

“To be explicitly clear, we do not blindly copy and paste what tools like ChatGPT generate, nor do we let AI write entire stories. Instead, we will use AI to inspire and strengthen our work — overcoming writer’s block, improving our…

“They are trained by going through mountains of internet text, repeatedly guessing the next few letters and then grading themselves against the real thing.” Aatish Bhatia This interactive explainer from The New York Times shows how large languages models construct words,…

“Senior management has declared a ‘code red’ that comes with a directive that all of its most important products—those with more than a billion users—must incorporate generative AI within months, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.”  Julia…

“We have no idea how its creator, OpenAI, handles data fed to the bot, and it is likely our inputs are being plowed right back into training the model, which means they could potentially be regurgitated to people using it…

““First, no LLM tool will be accepted as a credited author on a research paper. That is because any attribution of authorship carries with it accountability for the work, and AI tools cannot take such responsibility.““ NATURE Editorial Leading science…

“We’re about to enter a phase . . . where language is no longer the territory of the human.” Stephen Marche Writer Stephen Marche, in conversation with Andrew Yang, calls current large language models “a pocket calculator of language.” The…

AI and education pioneer Andrew Ng proposes how the power of AI can be within reach for small businesses and start-ups. When emerging AI platforms replace the need for purpose-built AI models, Ng says the result will be a democratizing…

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman foresees AI models to come and the value they will create. He’s interviewed by Reid Hoffman, a long-time Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor and currently a general partner at the venture capital company Greylock Partners. Silicon…

Microsoft News is upping its use of algorithms for certain editorial functions, handing out lay-off notices to contract journalists in the US and UK. Machines have been working alongside Microsoft editors for some time, assisting with editorial tasks for MSN,…

A 3D AI news anchor is the latest in a steady evolution of ‘vocational avatars’ in China. The AI figure is produced by Sogou, a Chinese search and internet company, which has pioneered AI news figures in association with Zinhua…

‘J’ is for journalism in an A-Z explainer about AI published online by the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) in collaboration with Google. The outcome is 26 short takes on a range of entry-level topics. Items also can be arranged by…

An AI system scanning 20 sources a second helps a Swedish publisher be first with local alerts on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. Called Corona Watch, the automated tool scans all regional health care sites and issues alerts when warranted. It…

An autoscribe system has been going to school on Long Island, New York, helping publisher Newsday learn how it can scale-up local news coverage using data from the area’s education system. Both journalists and technologists have increased their knowhow along…

Reuters is combining results packaging and synthetic media to create an AI-generated sportscaster onscreen. The synthetic figure is produced by a London-based AI company, Synthesia. The AI-driven sportscaster is a digital twin of a real person, Reuters global sports editor…

Runs 55:02 Turing Award recipient Yoshua Bengio connects deep learning to concepts of cognition described in ‘Thinking fast and Slow,’ the book by Daniel Kahneman. Bengio says ‘System 1’ thinking is like deep learning’s current state: He suggests future deep…

Finland will offer its free AI training to all EU languages starting in 2020. “It’s about one of the most pressing challenges facing Europe and Finland today: how to develop our digital literacy,” says Finnish MInister of Employment Timo Harakka…

‘If we value journalism as a social good, provided by humans for humans, then we have a window of perhaps 2-5 years, when news organizations must get across this technology.’ AI systems could have ‘a wide-ranging and profound influence on…

AI text generator GPT-2 is now fully available. The complete code and associated data was released by OpenAI, the California AI lab that created the model. The algorithm extrapolates text from a prompt phrase or sentence. You can try out…

by Tom Kent Feb 24, 2015 Updated October 2019   It’s routine now for news organizations to use artificial intelligence to write news. Robots are regularly transforming data into stories, and stories into multimedia presentations. As more organizations start deploying AI,…

‘…it’s making billions of lightning-fast probability calculations about word patterns’ The NEW YORKER takes a detailed look at predictive text by unpacking Smart Compose, the AI capability recently built into Google mail. But the stride and strength of this piece…

Efforts to combine the two foundations of AI may help systems express themselves. All AI systems work in one of two fundamental ways: Using logic – preprogrammed computer code that instructs operations step-by-step, known as symbolic computing. Using learning –…

Researchers at OpenAI in California found their algorithms started displaying complex behaviours after 25 million games. They stopped at 500 million. The algorithms evolved on their own over time The proof is in the results. Sets of algorithms, portrayed visually…

Conversational computing has its roots in 1966, reports MARKET RESEARCH JOURNALISM in a brief recounting of chatbot history. The first known chatbot was called ELIZA. ELIZA worked by detecting words in a user’s question and cross-referencing them to a pre-set…

‘Suthichai AI said that AI will revolutionize information by presenting news and analyzing it faster, with accuracy and in a more engaging way than conventional news presentation.’ THAI PBS reports that a distinguished Thai journalist has been reproduced as a…

Seventy-four sets of ethical guidelines have been developed for AI since 2016. It makes a total of 84 ethics documents currently in circulation. Sources split fairly evenly between government and private industry, each contributing about 22% of the total. The…

‘…after careful monitoring, OpenAI had not yet found any attempts of malicious use but had seen multiple beneficial applications, including in code autocompletion, grammar help, and developing question-answering systems for medical assistance.’ CONTEXT GPT-2, a text-generating AI model, created headlines…

BBC will use its own voice assistant on BBC platforms, including its website and BBC iPlayer, and make it available for third-party manufacturers. Its working name is Beeb, the nickname often used affectionately for the company. ‘Beeb‘ may also become…

The world’s largest computer chip will enable AI models to process 4 billion parameters at once, opening the door to a new scale of AI computing. The capacity of the new chip compares to about a million per chip typical…