Artificial Intelligence Review

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. I decided to go to CES kind of at the last minute. Over the holiday break, contacts from China kept messaging me about their travel plans. After the umpteenth “See you in…

Generative AI’s ability to write software code has quickly created one of the technology’s first real use cases for business. Professional software engineers and novices alike are using AI coding assistants to produce, test, edit, and debug code, reducing the amount of time it takes to complete the often tedious steps required to finish projects.…

Chatbots are skilled at crafting sophisticated dialogue and mimicking empathetic behavior. They never get tired of chatting. It’s no wonder, then, that so many people now use them for companionship—forging friendships or even romantic relationships.  According to a study from the nonprofit Common Sense Media, 72% of US teenagers have used AI for companionship. Although…

Hundreds of millions of people now use chatbots every day. And yet the large language models that drive them are so complicated that nobody really understands what they are, how they work, or exactly what they can and can’t do—not even the people who build them. Weird, right? It’s also a problem. Without a clear…

In sprawling stretches of farmland and industrial parks, supersized buildings packed with racks of computers are springing up to fuel the AI race. These engineering marvels are a new species of infrastructure: supercomputers designed to train and run large language models at mind-­bending scale, complete with their own specialized chips, cooling systems, and even energy…

How large is a large language model? Think about it this way. In the center of San Francisco there’s a hill called Twin Peaks from which you can view nearly the entire city. Picture all of it—every block and intersection, every neighborhood and park, as far as you can see—covered in sheets of paper. Now…

MIT Technology Review Explains: Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here. I am writing this because one of my editors woke up in the middle of the night and scribbled on a bedside notepad: “What is a…

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. Sometimes AI feels like a niche topic to write about, but then the holidays happen, and I hear relatives of all ages talking about cases of chatbot-induced psychosis, blaming rising electricity prices…

MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here. In an industry in constant flux, sticking your neck out to predict what’s coming next may seem reckless. (AI bubble? What AI bubble?) But for the…

We’re in the midst of a global mental-­health crisis. More than a billion people worldwide suffer from a mental-health condition, according to the World Health Organization. The prevalence of anxiety and depression is growing in many demographics, particularly young people, and suicide is claiming hundreds of thousands of lives globally each year. Given the clear…