Researchers have developed a range of analog and other unconventional machine learning systems in the expectation that they will prove vastly more energy efficient than today’s computers. But training these AIs to do their tasks has been a big stumbling block. Researchers at NTT Device Technology Labs and the University of Tokyo now say they’ve come up with a training algorithm (announced by NTT last month) that goes a long way toward letting these systems meet their promise.Their results, ...read more

In March 2022, a video appeared online that seemed to show Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, asking his troops to lay down their arms in the face of Russia’s invasion. The video—created with the help of artificial intelligence—was poor in quality and the ruse was quickly debunked, but as synthetic content becomes easier to produce and more convincing, a similar effort could someday have serious geopolitical consequences.That’s in part why, as computer scientists devise better m ...read more

This morning, drone-delivery company Zipline announced a new drone-delivery system offering nearly silent, precise delivery that’s intended to expand the company’s capabilities into home delivery. This requires a much different approach from what Zipline has been doing for the past eight years. In order to make home deliveries that are quiet and precise, Zipline has developed a creative new combination of hybrid drones, “droids,” and all the supporting hardware necessary to make deliver ...read more

The world emits 51 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere every year. To solve the climate crisis, we need to cut this in half by 2030, and get to zero by 2050. For electricity generation, this means the United States alone needs to increase renewable-energy capacities by 10 times over the next 12 years, which roughly translates to a mind-boggling 400,000 more wind turbines and 2.5 billion more solar panels. To accelerate this progress, Congress has recently passed the Inflation ...read more

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.HRI 2023: 13–16 March 2023, STOCKHOLMRobotics Summit & Expo: 10–11 May 2023, BOSTONICRA 2023: 29 May–2 June 2023, LONDONRoboCup 2023: 4–10 July 2023, BORDEAUX, FRANCERSS 2023: 10–14 July 2023, DAEGU, KOREAIEEE RO-MAN 2023: 28–31 August 2023, B ...read more

ChatGPT has wowed the world with the depth of its knowledge and the fluency of its responses, but one problem has hobbled its usefulness: It keeps hallucinating.Yes, large language models (LLMs) hallucinate, a concept popularized by Google AI researchers in 2018. Hallucination in this context refers to mistakes in the generated text that are semantically or syntactically plausible but are in fact incorrect or nonsensical. In short, you can’t trust what the machine is telling you.That’s why, ...read more

from the and-neither-should-you dept As we’re right at the 1 year anniversary of Russia’s unprovoked invasion of its sovereign neighbor, Ukraine, regular readers here will have followed along with all kinds of posts we’ve done on the subject, be it on tech-related items or some of the ways the video game industry has organized to help the country get the funds it needs to survive. Throughout it all, the conflict has, in most cases rightly, been pitched as a conflict between good and evi ...read more

I got OpenAI's ChatGPT to write some college admissions essays and asked tutors to review them. Two experts said they passed for student essays and may have had a shot at less selective colleges. I asked OpenAI's ChatGPT to write some college admissions essays and sent them to two expert tutors to review. Both said the essays passed for a real student's work and might even stand up at some less-selective colleges. Kevin Wong, Princeton University alumnus and cofounder of tutoring service P ...read more

Forget Gotham. Batman and Robin should turn their attention to Seattle. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser) If Seattle needs a hero to help its downtown emerge from a pandemic-induced funk, that person might just be wandering around Emerald City Comic Con this weekend. The event is certainly drawing thousands of people to the new Seattle Convention Center building, a $2 billion expansion that opened last month and is being heralded as one way to get people back into the city. Geeks of all sh ...read more

from the eating-shit,-but-without-the-ACLU's-nudging dept This isn’t about Bob Murray. I mean, it sure seems like it is. It involves a baseless defamation lawsuit against journalists, a West Virginia coal company CEO, and court losses for a litigious coal boss. This isn’t about “Eat Shit” Bob Murray, the head of (the now-bankrupted) Murray Energy who sued John Oliver for saying mean (but true!) things about him on his show. Murray was not only the recipient of a court rejection, he w ...read more