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Turning MIT inside-out

The all-new MIT Museum opened in Kendall Square this fall, welcoming more than 13,000 visitors in its first month. The 56,000-square-foot space next to the T station offers interactive exhibits and hands-on... Read more »

Rerouting

I became increasingly convinced that going to MIT was a necessary part of achieving my dreams. And yet it was not to be. That’s one of the tricky things about long-horizon problems:... Read more »

The Download: metaverse ethics, and spotting AI text

We’re in desperate need of ways to differentiate between human- and AI-written text in order to counter potential misuses of the technology, and researchers are developing tools to do exactly that. But... Read more »

How to spot AI-generated text

Because large language models work by predicting the next word in a sentence, they are more likely to use common words like “the,” “it,” or “is” instead of wonky, rare words. This... Read more »

I just watched Biggie Smalls perform ‘live’ in the metaverse

The team created a database of “micro-expression reference materials,” analyzed “pore-level resolution imagery,” and tracked the elasticity of sub-skin layers to understand how Smalls’s facial skin moved, Scott explains. Those minute changes... Read more »

The Download: generative AI, and psychedelic hype

—Jessica Hamzelou Jessica’s story is from The Checkup, her weekly biotech newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Thursday. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s... Read more »

Sam Altman: This is what I learned from DALL-E 2

I think there’s an important set of lessons for us, about what the next decade’s going to be like for AI.  The first is where it came from: which is a team... Read more »

Artists can now opt out of the next version of Stable Diffusion

A spokesperson for Stability.AI did not respond to a request for comment. In a tweet, Stability.AI’s founder Emad Mostaque said the company is not doing this for “ethical or legal reasons.” “We... Read more »

Mind-altering substances are being overhyped as wonder drugs

Others are using AI to analyze “trip reports” to figure out what exactly psychedelic drugs do to our brains, I reported in March.  There’s lots of anecdotal data to draw from. Plenty... Read more »

Generative AI is changing everything. But what’s left when the hype is gone?

The big breakthrough behind the new models is in the way images get generated. The first version of DALL-E used an extension of the technology behind OpenAI’s language model GPT-3, producing images... Read more »