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How this grassroots effort could make AI voices more diverse

Ryakitimbo has collected voice data in Kiswahili in Tanzania, Kenya, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. She tells me she wanted to collect voices from a socioeconomically diverse set of Kiswahili speakers... Read more »

The Download: understanding AI, and what to expect from the UN’s climate conference

Quote of the day “Shawty crunk, so fresh, so clean.” —Mark Zuckerberg, Meta CEO-turned rapper, debuts a reworked version of 2002 rap hit Get Low in a tribute to his wife, the... Read more »

What’s on the table at this year’s UN climate conference

As I covered last week, Trump’s election will almost certainly result in less progress on cutting emissions than we might have seen under a more climate-focused administration. But arguably an even bigger... Read more »

Google DeepMind has a new way to look inside an AI’s “mind”

Neuronpedia, a platform for mechanistic interpretability, partnered with DeepMind in July to build a demo of Gemma Scope that you can play around with right now. In the demo, you can test... Read more »

Unlocking the mysteries of complex biological systems with agentic AI

Agentic AI is not just another tool in the scientific toolkit but a paradigm shift: by allowing autonomous systems to not only collect and process data but also to independently hypothesize, experiment,... Read more »

The Download: the lab fighting exploitative AI, and plant engineering

Back in 2022, the tech community was buzzing over image-generating AI models, such as Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and OpenAI’s DALL-E 2, which could follow simple word prompts to depict fantasylands or whimsical... Read more »

The AI lab waging a guerrilla war over exploitative AI

Yet it is “simplistic to think that if you have a real security problem in the wild and you’re trying to design a protection tool, the answer should be it either works... Read more »

The Download: parkour for robot dogs, and Africa’s AI ambitions

Teaching robots to navigate new environments is tough. You can train them on physical, real-world data taken from recordings made by humans, but that’s scarce, and expensive to collect. Digital simulations are... Read more »

Africa’s AI researchers are ready for takeoff

Tech companies have been funneling billions of dollars into quantum computers for years. The hope is that they’ll be a game changer for fields as diverse as finance, drug discovery, and logistics.... Read more »

Generative AI taught a robot dog to scramble around a new environment

Researchers used the system, called LucidSim, to train a robot dog in parkour, getting it to scramble over a box and climb stairs, despite never seeing any real world data. The approach... Read more »