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Artificial intelligence

The AI Hype Index: College students are hooked on ChatGPT

MIT Technology Review’s highly subjective take on the latest buzz about AI, including Meta’s AI friends and how generative AI is helping a Neuralink patient communicate faster.

Belushi from Animal House wearing the "college" sweatshirt with the OpenAI logo added to it, stares dumbfounded at a maze and a brain with a cursor
Stephanie Arnett/MIT Technology Review | Alamy (Belushi), Adobe Stock (maze), rawpixel (brain)

Separating AI reality from hyped-up fiction isn’t always easy. That’s why we’ve created the AI Hype Index—a simple, at-a-glance summary of everything you need to know about the state of the industry.

Large language models confidently present their responses as accurate and reliable, even when they’re neither of those things. That’s why we’ve recently seen chatbots supercharge vulnerable people’s delusions, make citation mistakes in an important legal battle between music publishers and Anthropic, and (in the case of xAI’s Grok) rant irrationally about “white genocide.”

But it’s not all bad news—AI could also finally lead to a better battery life for your iPhone and solve tricky real-world problems that humans have been struggling to crack, if Google DeepMind’s new model is any indication. And perhaps most exciting of all, it could combine with brain implants to help people communicate when they have lost the ability to speak.

Deep Dive

Artificial intelligence

How a new type of AI is helping police skirt facial recognition bans

Adoption of the tech has civil liberties advocates alarmed, especially as the government vows to expand surveillance of protesters and students.

Inside Amsterdam’s high-stakes experiment to create fair welfare AI

The Dutch city thought it could break a decade-long trend of implementing discriminatory algorithms. Its failure raises the question: can these programs ever be fair?

Google DeepMind’s new AI agent cracks real-world problems better than humans can

AlphaEvolve uses large language models to find new algorithms that outperform the best human-made solutions for data center management, chip design, and more.

Inside the story that enraged OpenAI

In 2019, Karen Hao, a senior reporter with MIT Technology Review, pitched writing a story about a then little-known company, OpenAI. This is what happened next.

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