December 26, 2024

This international surveillance project aims to protect wheat from deadly diseases

When Dave Hodson walked through wheat fields in Ethiopia in 2010, it seemed as if everything had been painted yellow. A rust fungus was in the process of infecting about one-third of the country’s wheat, and winds had carried its spores far and wide, coating everything in their path. “The fields were completely yellow. You’d…

Amazon debuts ‘Rufus,’ an AI shopping assistant in its mobile app

February 1, 2024

Amazon announced today the launch of an AI-powered shopping assistant it’s calling Rufus that’s been trained on the e-commerce giant’s product catalog as well as information from around the web. The company says the new tool will launch to a subset of U.S. customers in beta, starting today, before expanding to more users in the […]

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Google Maps experiments with generative AI to improve discovery

February 1, 2024

Google Maps is introducing a generative AI feature to help you discover new places, the company announced today. Using large language models (LLMs), the new feature analyzes the over 250 million locations on Google Maps and contributions from over 300 million Local Guides to pull up suggestions based on what you’re looking for. For instance, […]

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This baby with a head camera helped teach an AI how kids learn language

February 1, 2024
Human babies are far better at learning than even the very best large language models. To be able to write in passable English, ChatGPT had to be  trained on massive data sets that contain millions or even a trillion words. Children, on the other hand, have access to only a tiny fraction of that data,…

Antitrust enforcers admit they’re in a race to understand how to tackle AI

February 1, 2024

Antitrust enforcers on both sides of the Atlantic are grappling to get a handle on AI, a conference in Brussels heard yesterday. It’s a moment that demands “extraordinary vigilance” and clear-sighted focus on how the market works, suggested top US competition law enforcers. From the European side, antitrust enforcers sounded more hesitant over how to […]

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