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Geoffrey Hinton tells us why he’s now scared of the tech he helped build

It took until the 2010s for the power of neural networks trained via backpropagation to truly make an impact. Working with a couple of graduate students, Hinton showed that his technique was... Read more »

Brain scans can translate a person’s thoughts into words

The researchers also showed the participants short Pixar videos that didn’t contain any dialogue, and recorded their brain responses in a separate experiment designed to test whether the decoder was able to... Read more »

Deep learning pioneer Geoffrey Hinton has quit Google

The 75-year-old computer scientist has divided his time between the University of Toronto and Google since 2013, when the tech giant acquired Hinton’s AI startup DNNresearch. Hinton’s company was a spinout from... Read more »

Undercover in the metaverse

The second aspect of preparation is related to mental health. Not all players behave the way you want them to behave. Sometimes people come just to be nasty. We prepare by going... Read more »

Deep learning pioneer Geoffrey Hinton quits Google

The 75-year-old computer scientist has divided his time between the University of Toronto and Google since 2013, when the tech giant acquired Hinton’s AI startup DNNresearch. Hinton’s company was a spin-out from... Read more »

The Download: policing the metaverse, and the dangers of extreme climate solutions

When Ravi Yekkanti puts on his headset to go to work, he never knows what the day spent in virtual reality will bring. Who might he meet? Will a child’s voice accost... Read more »

A chatbot that asks questions could help you spot when it makes no sense

Fernanda Viégas, a professor of computer science at Harvard University, who did not participate in the study, says she is excited to see a fresh take on explaining AI systems that not... Read more »

How bugs and chemicals in your poo could give away exactly what you’ve eaten

It was tricky to find specific bugs associated with specific foods, but the presence of one particular microbe was a strong indicator of whether or not a person had been drinking coffee.... Read more »

How an undercover content moderator polices the metaverse

Meta won’t say how many content moderators it employs or contracts in Horizon Worlds, or whether the company intends to increase that number with the new age policy. But the change puts... Read more »

The future of generative AI is niche, not generalized

Whether or not this really amounts to an “iPhone moment” or a serious threat to Google search isn’t obvious at present — while it will likely push a change in user behaviors... Read more »