The Unpredictable Abilities Emerging From Large AI Models
Large language models like ChatGPT are now big enough that they’ve started to display startling, unpredictable behaviors. What movie do…
Category: Features
Secret Messages Can Hide in AI-Generated Media
In steganography, an ordinary message masks the presence of a secret communication. Humans can never do it perfectly, but a…
Peering inside the black box of AI
Five years ago, computer scientist Alan Fern and his colleagues at Oregon State University, in Corvallis, set out to answer…
Should We Be Testing Everyone’s DNA?
Kelly Kashmer credits genetic testing with saving her life. In 2014, during a routine medical appointment, a physician’s assistant began…
The New Math of Wrinkling
A few minutes into a 2018 talk at the University of Michigan, Ian Tobasco picked up a large piece of paper and…
Will Transformers Take Over Artificial Intelligence?
Imagine going to your local hardware store and seeing a new kind of hammer on the shelf. You’ve heard about…
Some ecologists value parasites — and now want a plan to save them
Chelsea Wood always wanted to be a marine biologist. As a child growing up on New York’s Long Island, she…
Researchers turn to deep learning to decode protein structures
Twenty-eight years ago, computational biologists led by John Moult then at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, launched an ambitious, large-scale…
Bringing Out the Dead
One bright morning in November 2018, state biologists in Louisiana loaded three dead and toothy alligators, each more than 5…
Cold plasma and the farms of the future
Physicist Stephan Reuter of Polytechnique Montréal spends most days using his expertise in energy and matter to improve medical technologies.…