News coverage of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and the companies that make them. It’s a vast field, encompassing multiple disciplines such as computer science, data analytics and statistics, hardware and software engineering, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy and psychology. At a practical level, businesses use AI to automate repetitive digital and physical tasks, provide predictive analytics, identify object categorization, conduct natural language processing and generation, and more.
Some experts worry that AI will lead to job losses and worsen global financial inequality. Others point to the potential for AI to produce biased information or discriminate against certain social groups, because of the data it is trained on.
The modern groundwork for AI was laid in the 1950s, and major advances were made throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, including when IBM’s Deep Blue beat then world champion chess player Garry Kasparov. The late 2010s and early 2020s saw the development of generative AI, whereby computers could create original content such as text or images in response to prompts or user inputs. Examples include a chatbot like ChatGPT, or apps such as Midjourney or Veo 3, that can hold a conversation and generate images or video from simple text prompts. Generative AI also underpins many musical creation tools, from songwriting programs to instruments that can play music in the style of famous musicians.
Other innovations using AI include a virtual spectrometer designed to quickly assess the quality of material, and a machine that mimics human speech to improve translation for foreign languages. MIT researchers are combining biotechnology with AI to speed up the rate at which biological processes occur.