What could kill the $1trn artificial-intelligence boom?

What could kill the $1trn artificial-intelligence boom?

Mr Pichai is not alone. New Street Research, a firm of analysts, estimates that Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft will together splurge $104bn on building AI data centres this year. Add in spending by smaller tech firms and other industries and the total AI data-centre binge between 2023 and 2027 could reach $1.4trn. The scale … Read more

How to define artificial general intelligence

How to define artificial general intelligence

The idea of machines outsmarting humans has long been the subject of science fiction. Rapid improvements in artificial-intelligence (AI) programs over the past decade have led some experts to conclude that science fiction could soon become fact. On March 19th Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, the world’s biggest manufacturer of computer chips and … Read more

AI could accelerate scientific fraud as well as progress

AI could accelerate scientific fraud as well as progress

The aim of the session, organised by the Royal Society in partnership with Humane Intelligence, an American non-profit, was to break those guardrails. Some results were merely daft: one participant got the chatbot to claim ducks could be used as indicators of air quality (apparently, they readily absorb lead). Another prompted it to claim health … Read more

AI models make stuff up. How can hallucinations be controlled?

AI models make stuff up. How can hallucinations be controlled?

There are kinder ways to put it. In its instructions to users, OpenAI warns that ChatGPT “can make mistakes”. Anthropic, an American AI company, says that its LLM Claude “may display incorrect or harmful information”; Google’s Gemini warns users to “double-check its responses”. The throughline is this: no matter how fluent and confident AI-generated text … Read more