The demand for new and improved infrastructure across the world is not being met. The Asian Development Bank has estimated that in Asia alone, roughly $1.7 trillion needs to be invested annually through to 2030 just to sustain economic growth and offset the effects of climate change. Globally, that figure has been put at $15 trillion. In the US, for example, it is no secret that the country’s highways, railways and bridges are in need of updating. But similar to many other sectors, there are significant shortages in skilled workers and resources, which delays all-important repairs and maintenance and harms […]

Despite their impressive capabilities, large language models are far from perfect. These artificial intelligence models sometimes “hallucinate” by generating incorrect or unsupported information in response to a query. Due to this hallucination problem, an LLM’s responses are often verified by human fact-checkers, especially if a model is deployed in a high-stakes setting like health care or finance. However, validation processes typically require people to read through long documents cited by the model, a task so onerous and error-prone it may prevent some users from deploying generative AI models in the first place. To help human validators, MIT researchers created a […]

Meta is releasing a massive data set and models, called Open Materials 2024, that could help scientists use AI to discover new materials much faster. OMat24 tackles one of the biggest bottlenecks in the discovery process: data. To find new materials, scientists calculate the properties of elements across the periodic table and simulate different combinations on computers. This work could help us discover new materials with properties that can help mitigate climate change, for example, by making better batteries or helping create new sustainable fuels. But it requires massive data sets that are hard to come by. Creating them requires […]