If someone advises you to “know your limits,” they’re likely suggesting you do things like exercise in moderation. To a robot, though, the motto represents learning constraints, or limitations of a specific task within the machine’s environment, to do chores safely and correctly.For instance, imagine asking a robot to clean [...]

One might argue that one of the primary duties of a physician is to constantly evaluate and re-evaluate the odds: What are the chances of a medical procedure’s success? Is the patient at risk of developing severe symptoms? When should the patient return for more testing? Amidst these critical deliberations, [...]

One might argue that one of the primary duties of a physician is to constantly evaluate and re-evaluate the odds: What are the chances of a medical procedure’s success? Is the patient at risk of developing severe symptoms? When should the patient return for more testing? Amidst these critical deliberations, [...]

Google DeepMind has announced an impressive grab bag of new products and prototypes that may just let it seize back its lead in the race to turn generative artificial intelligence into a mass-market concern.  Top billing goes to Gemini 2.0—the latest iteration of Google DeepMind’s family of multimodal large language models, [...]

Like many others, I recently fled social media platform X for Bluesky. In the process, I started following many of the people I followed on X. On Thanksgiving, I was delighted to see a private message from a fellow AI reporter, Will Knight from Wired. Or at least that’s who [...]

Machine-learning models can fail when they try to make predictions for individuals who were underrepresented in the datasets they were trained on.For instance, a model that predicts the best treatment option for someone with a chronic disease may be trained using a dataset that contains mostly male patients. That model [...]

The rapidly increasing aging population will lead to a shortage of care providers in the future. While robotic technologies are a potential alternative, their widespread use is limited by poor acceptance. In a new study, researchers have examined a user-centric approach to understand the factors influencing user willingness among caregivers [...]

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. The AI sector is plagued by a lack of competition and a lot of deceit—or at least that’s one way to interpret the latest flurry of actions [...]

One afternoon in late November, I visited a weapons test site in the foothills east of San Clemente, California operated by Anduril, a maker of AI-powered drones and missiles that recently announced a partnership with OpenAI. I went there to witness a new system it’s expanding today, which allows external [...]

Imagine an artificial intelligence (AI) model that can watch and understand moving images with the subtlety of a human brain. Now, scientists have made this a reality by creating MovieNet: an innovative AI that processes videos much like how our brains interpret real-life scenes as they unfold over time. [...]

Pretrained large-scale AI models need to 'forget' specific information for privacy and computational efficiency, but no methods exist for doing so in black-box vision-language models, where internal details are inaccessible. Now, researchers addressed this issue through a strategy based on latent context sharing, successfully getting an image classifier to forget [...]

Physicists have devised an algorithm that provides a mathematical framework for how learning works in lattices called mechanical neural networks. [...]