Technology

Humans are complicated beings. The ways we communicate are multilayered, and psychologists have devised many kinds of tests to measure our ability to infer meaning and understanding from interactions with each other.  AI models are getting better at these tests. New research published today in Nature Human Behavior found that some large language models (LLMs)…

Fourteen years ago, a journalist named Melanie Reid attempted a jump on horseback and fell. The accident left her mostly paralyzed from the chest down. Eventually she regained control of her right hand, but her left remained “useless,” she told reporters at a press conference last week.  Now, thanks to a new noninvasive device that…

Consumer demand for the latest AI technology is heating up. The launch of OpenAI’s latest flagship model, GPT-4o, has now driven the company’s biggest-ever spike in revenue on mobile, despite the model being freely available on the web. GPT-4o, launched last Monday, can handle text, speech, and video, and delivers real-time responsiveness and a range […]

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This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. GPT-4o’s Chinese token-training data is polluted by spam and porn websites Soon after OpenAI released GPT-4o last Monday, some Chinese speakers started to notice that something seemed off about this newest version of…

In deserts across Australia and South Africa, astronomers are planting forests of metallic detectors that will together scour the cosmos for radio signals. When it boots up in five years or so, the Square Kilometer Array Observatory will look for new information about the universe’s first stars and the different stages of galactic evolution.  But…

A new crop of early-stage startups — along with some recent VC investments — illustrates a niche emerging in the autonomous vehicle technology sector. Unlike the companies bringing robotaxis to city streets, these startups are taking their tech off-road.  Two recent entrants — Seattle-based Overland AI and New Brunswick-based Potential — are poised to get […]

© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Soon after OpenAI released GPT-4o on Monday, May 13, its newest version of the large-language model chatbot, some Chinese-language speakers started to notice something seemed off: the tokens it uses to parse text were full of spam and porn phrases. On May 14, Tianle Cai, a Ph.D student at Princeton University studying inference efficiency in…

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. How cuddly robots could change dementia care Companion animals can stave off some of the loneliness, anxiety, and agitation that come with Alzheimer’s disease, according to studies. Sadly, people with Alzheimer’s aren’t always…

Recorded on May 16, 2024 Why Thermal Batteries are So Hot Right Now Speakers: Casey Crownhart, climate reporter and Amy Nordrum, executive editor Thermal batteries could be a key part of cleaning up heavy industry, and our readers chose them as the 11th breakthrough on MIT Technology Review’s 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2024. Learn what…