Millions of images of passports, credit cards, birth certificates, and other documents containing personally identifiable information are likely included in one of the biggest open-source AI training sets, new research has found. Thousands of images—including identifiable faces—were found in a small subset of DataComp CommonPool, a major AI training set for [...]

As countries across the world experience a resurgence in nuclear energy projects, the questions of where and how to dispose of nuclear waste remain as politically fraught as ever. The United States, for instance, has indefinitely stalled its only long-term underground nuclear waste repository. Scientists are using both modeling and [...]

MIT Technology Review’s How To series helps you get things done.  Simon Willison has a plan for the end of the world. It’s a USB stick, onto which he has loaded a couple of his favorite open-weight LLMs—models that have been shared publicly by their creators and that can, in principle, [...]

Large language models (LLMs) excel at using textual reasoning to understand the context of a document and provide a logical answer about its contents. But these same LLMs often struggle to correctly answer even the simplest math problems.Textual reasoning is usually a less-than-ideal way to deliberate over computational or algorithmic [...]

Imagine a future where artificial intelligence quietly shoulders the drudgery of software development: refactoring tangled code, migrating legacy systems, and hunting down race conditions, so that human engineers can devote themselves to architecture, design, and the genuinely novel problems still beyond a machine’s reach. Recent advances appear to have nudged [...]

No one knows exactly how AI will transform our communities, workplaces, and society as a whole. Because it’s hard to predict the impact AI will have on jobs, many workers and local governments are left trying to read the tea leaves to understand how to prepare and adapt. A new interactive [...]

MIT researchers have developed a new theoretical framework for studying the mechanisms of treatment interactions. Their approach allows scientists to efficiently estimate how combinations of treatments will affect a group of units, such as cells, enabling a researcher to perform fewer costly experiments while gathering more accurate data.As an example, [...]

As soon as Google launched its latest video-generating AI model at the end of May, creatives rushed to put it through its paces. Released just months after its predecessor, Veo 3 allows users to generate sounds and dialogue for the first time, sparking a flurry of hyperrealistic eight-second clips stitched [...]

Neural networks first treat sentences like puzzles solved by word order, but once they read enough, a tipping point sends them diving into word meaning instead—an abrupt “phase transition” reminiscent of water flashing into steam. By revealing this hidden switch, researchers open a window into how transformer models such as [...]

A multinational team has cracked a long-standing barrier to reliable quantum computing by inventing an algorithm that lets ordinary computers faithfully mimic a fault-tolerant quantum circuit built on the notoriously tricky GKP bosonic code, promising a crucial test-bed for future quantum hardware. [...]

A research team has achieved the holy grail of quantum computing: an exponential speedup that’s unconditional. By using clever error correction and IBM’s powerful 127-qubit processors, they tackled a variation of Simon’s problem, showing quantum machines are now breaking free from classical limitations, for real. [...]

Quantum computing just got a significant boost thanks to researchers at the University of Osaka, who developed a much more efficient way to create "magic states" a key component for fault-tolerant quantum computers. By pioneering a low-level, or "level-zero," distillation method, they dramatically reduced the number of qubits and computational [...]