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The connecting tissue of research, technology and culture.
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When the Machine Lifts: What Americans Actually See in AI's Gains
A clear majority of Americans 57% now say artificial intelligence is bad for society, and 67% disapprove of how President Donald Trump is handling the technology. 1] Those two figures, from an ABC News/Washington...
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The Feature Names Were Right. The Columns Were Not.
The obvious question about large language models in data work is whether they beat the old statistical tools. The 2026 study "When Do LLMs Help with Feature Selection? A Systematic Empirical Study" answers it, and the...
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When the Model Says "I": The Real Gain in AI Welfare Research
The gains from artificial intelligence are usually counted in tasks completed, tokens processed, or hours saved. There is a quieter gain on offer in 2025, and it is not a product feature. It is knowledge: a way of...
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When the Attack Doesn't Need Its Sharpest Weapon
An adversarial attack against an image classifier is usually described by a single number: how much, in total, the pixels were allowed to move. In the standard formulation, that budget is an L1 constraint the sum of...
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The Safety Bill That Shows How AI Regulation Actually Works
Anthropic has drafted legislation that would let the federal government stop a frontier AI model from being released, but only after a court agrees the risk is real. The draft, reported by...
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The Safety Check AI Can Now Do Without the Safety Checker
Elon Musk has offered a hedge dressed as a commitment. In a post on X, he said SpaceX will "probably" follow Anthropic in granting outside evaluators access to its AI systems 1]. The word doing the work here is...
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The Robot That Says It Knows Where to Cut
A robot is told to cut a cake. There is no knife. A plate sits on the counter, and the machine reaches for its rim not the flat center, not the underside, but the thin edge and saws. That single gesture is the promise...
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The Question 3D AI Was Never Asked
The standard measure of a 3D language model is whether it gets the right answer. A question about a room, a point cloud of that room, a response correct or incorrect. On that measure, the field has been making progress...
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When the Machine Knows Which Way the Head Is Facing
A radiologist stares at a stack of two dimensional MRI slices, each one meant to be a thin horizontal cut through a fetal brain. If the fetus held still, those slices would line up neatly and reconstruct into a clean...
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The Chatbot's Rulebook Was Hiding in Plain Sight
Somewhere in the code of around 80 WhatsApp help and FAQ pages, Meta's instructions to its support chatbot were left lying around. 1] Not in a vault, not behind a login in the underlying source of ordinary FAQ pages...
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The City That Thinks Before It Acts
For two decades, the promise of the smart city rested on a simple premise: install enough sensors, and the city will understand itself. Cameras and other sensors watched intersections. Sensors logged environmental...
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The Machine That Learns to Look Right
Behind most of the headlines about artificial intelligence sits a single architecture: the large language model, trained on vast piles of text to predict what comes next. 1] It is powerful, and it is also narrow in a...
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