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The robot race is fueling a fight for training data

“A lot of people are scrambling to figure out what’s the next big data source,” says Pras Velagapudi, chief technology officer of Agility Robotics, which makes a humanoid robot that operates in... Read more »

The Download: inside the US defense tech aid package, and how AI is improving vegan cheese

After weeks of drawn-out congressional debate over how much the United States should spend on conflicts abroad, President Joe Biden signed a $95 billion aid package into law last week. The bill... Read more »

Here’s the defense tech at the center of US aid to Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan

One of those systems is Israel’s Iron Dome, in which radar systems detect projectiles and then signal units to launch defensive missiles that detonate the target high in the sky before it... Read more »

The Download: how to tell when a chatbot is lying, and RIP my biotech plants

How it works: The Trustworthy Language Model gives any output generated by a large language model a score between 0 and 1, according to its reliability. This lets people choose which responses... Read more »

My biotech plants are dead

Hodge says he got interested in the plants after reading an article about combating light pollution by using bioluminescent flora instead of streetlamps. As a biologist who studies how day and night... Read more »

Chatbot answers are all made up. This new tool helps you figure out which ones to trust.

The Trustworthy Language Model draws on multiple techniques to calculate its scores. First, each query submitted to the tool is sent to several different large language models. Cleanlab is using five versions... Read more »

The Download: hyperrealistic deepfakes, and clean energy’s implications for mining

Until now, AI-generated videos of people have tended to have some stiffness, glitchiness, or other unnatural elements that make them pretty easy to differentiate from reality. For the past several years, AI... Read more »

Want less mining? Switch to clean energy.

Many minerals appear in small concentrations in source rock, so the process of extracting them has a large footprint relative to the amount of final product. A mining operation would need to... Read more »

Hydrogen could be used for nearly everything. It probably shouldn’t be. 

Beyond that, though, hydrogen will probably be most useful in industries where there aren’t other practical options already on the table.  That’s a central idea behind an infographic I think about a... Read more »

An AI startup made a hyperrealistic deepfake of me that’s so good it’s scary

The more data points the AI system has on facial movements, microexpressions, head tilts, blinks, shrugs, and hand waves, the more realistic the avatar will be. DAVID VINTINER He then asks me... Read more »