research - CybAI news

17 Oct

Google’s NotebookLM Now Lets You Customize Its AI Podcasts

stp2y0 CommentsAIartificial intelligence, google, podcasts, research

Google just added a new customization tool for the viral AI podcasts in its NotebookLM software. I got early access and tested it out using Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis as the source material, spending a few hours generating podcasts about the seminal novella—some of them more unhinged than others.Released by Google Labs in 2023 as an experimental, AI-focused writing tool, NotebookLM has been enjoying a resurgence in user interest since early September, when the developers added an option to generate podcast-like conversations between two AI voices—one male-sounding and one female-sounding—from uploaded documents. While these audio “deep dives” can be used…

15 Oct

Apple Engineers Show How Flimsy AI ‘Reasoning’ Can Be

stp2y0 CommentsAIapple, ars technica, artificial intelligence, openai, research

For a while now, companies like OpenAI and Google have been touting advanced "reasoning" capabilities as the next big step in their latest artificial intelligence models. Now, though, a new study from six Apple engineers shows that the mathematical "reasoning" displayed by advanced large language models can be extremely brittle and unreliable in the face of seemingly trivial changes to common benchmark problems.The fragility highlighted in these new results helps support previous research suggesting that LLMs' use of probabilistic pattern matching is missing the formal understanding of underlying concepts needed for truly reliable mathematical reasoning capabilities. "Current LLMs are not…

07 Oct

The OpenAI Talent Exodus Gives Rivals an Opening

stp2y0 CommentsGenAIalgorithms, artificial intelligence, openai, research, startups

When investors poured $6.6 billion into OpenAI last week, they seemed largely unbothered by the latest drama, which recently saw the company’s chief technology officer, Mira Murati, along with chief research officer Bob McCrew and Barret Zoph, a vice president of research, abruptly quit.And yet those three departures were just the latest in an ongoing exodus of key technical talent. Over the past few years, OpenAI has lost several researchers who played crucial roles in developing the algorithms, techniques, and infrastructure that helped make it the world leader in AI as well as a household name. Several other ex-OpenAI employees…

17 Sep

OpenAI Threatens Bans as Users Probe Its ‘Strawberry’ AI Models

stp2y0 CommentsAIars technica, artificial intelligence, openai, research

OpenAI truly does not want you to know what its latest AI model is “thinking.” Since the company launched its “Strawberry” AI model family last week, touting so-called reasoning abilities with o1-preview and o1-mini, OpenAI has been sending out warning emails and threats of bans to any user who tries to probe how the model works.Unlike previous AI models from OpenAI, such as GPT-4o, the company trained o1 specifically to work through a step-by-step problem-solving process before generating an answer. When users ask an "o1" model a question in ChatGPT, users have the option of seeing this chain-of-thought process written…

08 Aug

PaleoScan is a cheap imaging device democratizing fossil research

stp2y0 CommentsNewsbrazil, fossil, gear, news, nyu, research, tomorrow

An innovative scanner created by an NYU computer scientist is allowing scientists to digitize previously isolated fossils in remote South American regions. Claudio Silva’s PaleoScan provides a portable and affordable way to preserve and share collections of ancient impressions that may have otherwise been lost or smuggled.Brazil’s Araripe Basin is lush with ancient fossils, some in unusually pristine condition. After a visit to the nearby Plácido Cidade Nuvens Museum of Paleontology (MPPCN), where many of them are stored, Silva saw “a labyrinth of floor-to-ceiling metal shelving units” that was “stacked high with piles of the most beautiful fossils he’d ever…

07 Jul

The Words That Give Away Generative AI Text

stp2y0 CommentsRAG modelsars technica, artificial intelligence, research, words

Thus far, even AI companies have had trouble coming up with tools that can reliably detect when a piece of writing was generated using a large language model. Now, a group of researchers has established a novel method for estimating LLM usage across a large set of scientific writing by measuring which "excess words" started showing up much more frequently during the LLM era (i.e., 2023 and 2024). The results "suggest that at least 10 percent of 2024 abstracts were processed with LLMs," according to the researchers.In a preprint paper posted earlier this month, four researchers from Germany's University of…

26 Jun

With AI Tools, Scientists Can Crack the Code of Life

stp2y0 CommentsAIartificial intelligence, DeepMind, google, health, research, science

In 2021, AI research lab DeepMind announced the development of its first digital biology neural network, AlphaFold. The model was capable of accurately predicting the 3D structure of proteins, which determines the functions that these molecules play. “We’re just floating bags of water moving around,” says Pushmeet Kohli, VP of research at DeepMind. “What makes us special are proteins, the building blocks of life. How they interact with each other is what makes the magic of life happen.”AlphaFold was considered by the journal Science as the breakthrough of the year in 2021. In 2022, it was the most cited research…

23 May

AI Is a Black Box. Anthropic Figured Out a Way to Look Inside

stp2y0 CommentsAIalgorithms, artificial intelligence, deep learning, neural networks, research

Last year, the team began experimenting with a tiny model that uses only a single layer of neurons. (Sophisticated LLMs have dozens of layers.) The hope was that in the simplest possible setting they could discover patterns that designate features. They ran countless experiments with no success. “We tried a whole bunch of stuff, and nothing was working. It looked like a bunch of random garbage,” says Tom Henighan, a member of Anthropic’s technical staff. Then a run dubbed “Johnny”—each experiment was assigned a random name—began associating neural patterns with concepts that appeared in its outputs.“Chris looked at it, and…