When OpenAI announced GPT-4, its latest large language model, last March, it sent shockwaves through the tech world. It was clearly more capable than anything seen before at chatting, coding, and solving all sorts of thorny problems—including school homework. Anthropic, a rival to OpenAI, announced today that it has made its own AI advance…
Ever since the rollout of ChatGPT in November 2022, many people in science, business, and media have been obsessed with AI. A cursory look at my own published work during that period fingers me as among the guilty. My defense is that I share with those other obsessives a belief that large language models…
The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Two years ago, in a project called the Beyond the Imitation Game benchmark, or BIG-bench, 450 researchers compiled a list of 204 tasks designed to test the capabilities of large language models, which power chatbots like ChatGPT. On most tasks, performance improved predictably and…
Chart captions that explain complex trends and patterns are important for improving a reader’s ability to comprehend and retain the data being presented. And for people with visual disabilities, the information in a caption often provides their only means of understanding the chart. But writing effective, detailed captions is a labor-intensive process. While autocaptioning techniques…