Goto

Collaborating Authors

 Problem Solving



The Download: Pokรฉmon Go to train world models, and the US-China race to find aliens

MIT Technology Review

Plus: AI fakes of the Iran war are flooding X--and Grok is failing to flag them. Pokรฉmon Go was the world's first augmented-reality megahit. Released in 2016 by Niantic, the AR twist on the juggernaut Pokรฉmon franchise fast became a global phenomenon. "500 million people installed that app in 60 days," says Brian McClendon, CTO at Niantic Spatial, an AI company that Niantic spun out last year. Now Niantic Spatial is using that vast trove of crowdsourced data to build a kind of world model--a buzzy new technology that grounds the smarts of LLMs in real environments. The firm wants to use it to help robots navigate more precisely.


When to Trust the Cheap Check: Weak and Strong Verification for Reasoning

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Reasoning with LLMs increasingly unfolds inside a broader verification loop. Internally, systems use cheap checks, such as self-consistency or proxy rewards, which we call weak verification. Externally, users inspect outputs and steer the model through feedback until results are trustworthy, which we call strong verification. These signals differ sharply in cost and reliability: strong verification can establish trust but is resource-intensive, while weak verification is fast and scalable but noisy and imperfect. We formalize this tension through weak--strong verification policies, which decide when to accept or reject based on weak verification and when to defer to strong verification. We introduce metrics capturing incorrect acceptance, incorrect rejection, and strong-verification frequency. Over population, we show that optimal policies admit a two-threshold structure and that calibration and sharpness govern the value of weak verifiers. Building on this, we develop an online algorithm that provably controls acceptance and rejection errors without assumptions on the query stream, the language model, or the weak verifier.