Artificial intelligence

Today’s AI largely lives in computers, but acting and reacting in the real world — that’s the realm of robots. In this week’s episode, co-host Steven Strogatz talks with pioneering roboticist Daniela Rus about creativity, collaboration, and the unusual forms robots of the future might take.

Common sense has been viewed as one of the hardest challenges in AI. That said, ChatGPT4 has acquired what some believe is an impressive sense of humanity. How is this possible? Listen to this week’s “The Joy of Why” with co-host Steven Strogatz.

Neural networks and other forms of machine learning ultimately learn by trial and error, one improvement at a time.

Three years ago, Google’s AlphaFold pulled off the biggest artificial intelligence breakthrough in science to date, accelerating molecular research and kindling deep questions about why we do science.

How are scientists able to crack fundamental questions about nature and life? How does math make the complex cosmos understandable? In this episode, the physicist Nigel Goldenfeld and co-host Steven Strogatz explore the deep foundations of the scientific process.

Computer scientist Lance Fortnow writes that by embracing the computations that surround us, we can begin to understand and tame our seemingly random world.

Optical neural networks, which use photons instead of electrons, have advantages over traditional systems. They also face major obstacles.

Researchers are drawing on ideas from game theory to improve large language models and make them more consistent.

Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold3 and other deep learning algorithms can now predict the shapes of interacting complexes of protein, DNA, RNA and other molecules, better capturing cells’ biological landscapes.