Machine learning & AI news

Robotics

Chinese humanoid robots smash human records in 100m sprint and high jump at Beijing robot games

Chinese humanoid robots broke records set by humans, including beating Usain Bolt's 100-meter sprint world record, on the opening day of the Olympics-like World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing on Saturday.

Machine learning & AI

AI agents can build consensus on a scale humans can't

Everyone is familiar with the situation: A larger group of people plans to visit a restaurant together, but it can take time and sometimes a great deal of patience to agree on a time and place to meet. The better the participants ...

Business

AI-generated ads outperform human designers in live campaign, advantage holds 18 months later

The common belief throughout the marketing and advertising world is that generative AI can produce striking visuals, but it struggles to match the performance and brand discipline of skilled human designers. New research ...

Robotics

Robots learn new skills from a single video—in just 29 seconds

To operate reliably in dynamic real-world settings, robots should be able to acquire new skills quickly without undergoing extensive additional training. Most existing robotic systems, however, primarily perform well on the ...

Machine learning & AI

AI helps turn citizen photos into water-level data

For the past 15 years, Christopher Lowry, Ph.D., has led CrowdHydrology, a University at Buffalo citizen-science project that relies on thousands of volunteers to collect water-level observations from streams and other waterways ...

Machine learning & AI

Q&A: Promise and perils of agentic AI

Chatbots and large language models can execute a seemingly countless number of tasks, from writing emails and reports to generating code and analyzing data. However, they still primarily act only in response to user prompts ...

Security

How attackers persuade AI agents to break the rules

Today, most of us interact with AI assistants—reactive bots that wait for human instructions. Yet AI assistants are rapidly being replaced by agentic AI agents that can interact with external tools, browse the web, generate ...

Machine learning & AI

OpenAI says ads are coming to ChatGPT in Europe next week

European users of ChatGPT's free and low-cost artificial intelligence agents will start seeing ads Aug. 24 as its creator, OpenAI, expands its plan to extract more revenue from its models.

Machine learning & AI

China goes rural with data centers in quest to power AI

In China's hilly Guizhou province, a cluster of European-style buildings complete with a clock tower and a multi-arched bridge emits a low, permanent hum—a clue to its unexpected identity as tech giant Huawei's largest data ...

Computer Sciences

AI model excels in single image reflection removal

Capturing a picturesque scene through reflective materials, such as glass, often results in an unintended superimposition—showing both the transmitted scene and the undesired reflected scene. While traditional reflection ...

Machine learning & AI

OpenAI shelves plans for erotic chatbot

OpenAI has put plans for a sexually explicit chatbot on hold indefinitely, the company said Thursday, amid mounting concerns about the societal and reputational risks of releasing such a product.

Internet

Here's how AI can (and can't) help you in your job hunt

For many job seekers, it might seem like there's never been a harder time to find a job. Hiring for white-collar jobs has been especially weak, part of what economists call a "low-hire, low-fire" job market in which businesses ...

Software

AI tech recognizes human actions from just a few example videos

Typically, AI requires massive amounts of training data to understand complex human actions. However, in real-world scenarios, it is often difficult to secure sufficient video data for specific actions. A research team led ...

Consumer & Gadgets

Asking AI to act like an expert can make it less reliable

To get the best out of AI, some users tell it to provide answers as if it were an expert. Others ask it to adopt a persona, such as a safety monitor, to guide its responses. However, this approach can sometimes hurt performance, ...

Consumer & Gadgets

LLMs and creativity: AI responses show less variety than human ones

Can using a large language model (LLM) make a person more creative? Prior work has shown that using LLMs can make creative outputs more homogeneous, but this homogenization could stem from the specific LLM used or from widespread ...

Business

Widespread AI adoption masks deeper problem, study shows

Irrespective of the ethics and the apocalyptic predictions, artificial intelligence (AI) has already become a central component of economic and institutional decision-making. Research in the International Journal of Intelligent ...