These new tools let you see for yourself how biased AI image models are

Popular AI image-generating systems notoriously tend to amplify harmful biases and stereotypes. But just how big a problem is it? You can now see for yourself using interactive new online tools. (Spoiler alert: it’s big.) The tools, built by researchers at AI startup Hugging Face and Leipzig University and detailed in a non-peer-reviewed paper, allow

The Download: Google’s Bard experiment, and Ernie Bot’s rehabilitation

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Google just launched Bard, its answer to ChatGPT—and it wants you to make it better Google has launched Bard, the search giant’s answer to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing Chat. Unlike Bing Chat,

The bearable mediocrity of Baidu’s ChatGPT competitor

China Report is MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology developments in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday. Did you stay up late last week to watch the release of Ernie Bot, the first Chinese rival to ChatGPT? It felt like the most anticipated event in China’s tech world so far this year,

Google just launched Bard, its answer to ChatGPT—and it wants you to make it better

Google has launched Bard, the search giant’s answer to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing Chat. Unlike Bing Chat, Bard does not look up search results—all the information it returns is generated by the model itself. But it is still designed to help users brainstorm and answer queries. Google wants Bard to become an integral part

The Download: how we can limit global warming, and GPT-4’s early adopters

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. The UN just handed out an urgent climate to-do list. Here’s what it says. Time is running short to limit global warming to 1.5°C (2.7 °F) above preindustrial levels, but there are feasible

How AI experts are using GPT-4

WOW, last week was intense. Several leading AI companies had major product releases. Google said it was giving developers access to its AI language models, and AI startup Anthropic unveiled its AI assistant Claude. But one announcement outshined them all: OpenAI’s new multimodal large language model, GPT-4. My colleague William Douglas Heaven got an exclusive preview. Read about

Language models might be able to self-correct biases—if you ask them

Large language models are infamous for spewing toxic biases, thanks to the reams of awful human-produced content they get trained on.  But if the models are large enough, and humans have helped train them, then they may be able to self-correct for some of these biases. Remarkably, all we have to do is ask. That’s

The UN just handed out an urgent climate to-do list. Here’s what it says.

Time is running short to address climate change, but there are feasible and effective solutions on the table, according to a new UN climate report released today.  Despite decades of warnings from scientists, global greenhouse-gas emissions are still climbing, hitting a record high in 2022. If humanity wants to limit the worst effects of climate

The Download: weight loss drugs, and a new abortion fight frontier

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Weight-loss injections have taken over the internet. But what does this mean for people IRL? Over the course of the last year, so-called “miracle” weight-loss drugs have blown up across the internet. Although

Texas is trying out new tactics to restrict access to abortion pills online

This article is from The Technocrat, MIT Technology Review’s weekly tech policy newsletter about power, politics, and Silicon Valley. To receive it in your inbox every Friday, sign up here. There’s been a quiet shift in the abortion fight in the US. Since the reversal of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court last June,