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Predicting what a system will do next is one problem. Predicting the moment it stops behaving the way it used to is a much harder one, and for most of the systems scientists care about, the more…
Ask two neuroscientists to point to the same spot in the human brain and you may get two different answers. One is looking at a stained tissue slice under a microscope, counting cell layers a…
When a person speaks, the face gives the game away. A hard "b" presses the lips shut. A wide vowel drops the jaw. Surprise lifts the brows a beat before the word lands. We read those correspondences…
Ask someone to memorize a shopping list and then say it back in any order, and a few reliable habits show up. People tend to blurt out the last few items first. They often start strong on the first…
Picture an ant trying to walk a trail while a herd of elephants stampedes down the same path. That is roughly the problem Prem Kumar and his group at Northwestern set themselves, and the ant,…
Ask a person to drive from a friend's house to a restaurant they've never visited, in a city they know only in patches, and something quietly remarkable happens. They don't consult a lookup table of…
Ask a chatbot for a proof and you brace for a confident, wrong answer. So there is a certain irony in what a team of four researchers reported this week: they asked a language model to help with a…
Picture a weather model. Its job is not to label a picture but to take one continuous field (the temperature and pressure and wind across every point of the atmosphere at noon) and return another…
Ask a generative model trained on a database of known crystals to invent something new, and it faces a quiet contradiction. Everything in its training rewarded it for producing structures that look…
The microphone button keeps moving closer to the middle of the screen. Assistants now open in voice mode, cars and headphones take dictation, and the implicit promise is that speaking a question and…
European data-protection practice contains a small thought experiment. Imagine a stranger who is reasonably competent, has access to public records and search engines, and genuinely wants to work out…
Imagine two people on the phone, each holding a photograph. Neither can see the other's. Their job is to decide whether the two pictures are the same and, if not, to find the difference. This is a…