Watch a subscriber-only conversation unpacking our new series, "The New Conspiracy Age," and how this moment is changing science and technology. Everything is a conspiracy theory now. Watch a discussion with our editors and Mike Rothschild, journalist and conspiracy theory expert, about how we can make sense of them all. What it's like to be in the middle of a conspiracy theory (according to a conspiracy theory expert) It's surprisingly easy to stumble into a relationship with an AI chatbot Rhiannon Williams OpenAI's new LLM exposes the secrets of how AI really works Will Douglas Heaven It's surprisingly easy to stumble into a relationship with an AI chatbot The idea that machines will be as smart as--or smarter than--humans has hijacked an entire industry. But look closely and you'll see it's a myth that persists for many of the same reasons conspiracies do. The experimental model won't compete with the biggest and best, but it could tell us why they behave in weird ways--and how trustworthy they really are.

Plus: Donald Trump wants to outlaw individual states' right to regulate AI The International Energy Agency recently released the latest version of the World Energy Outlook, the annual report that takes stock of the current state of global energy and looks toward the future. It contains some interesting insights and a few surprising figures about electricity, grids, and the state of climate change. Let's dig into some numbers . This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review's weekly climate newsletter. Everything is a conspiracy theory now. Our latest series " The New Conspiracy Age " delves into how conspiracies have gripped the White House, turning fringe ideas into dangerous policy, and how generative AI is altering the fabric of truth.

Recent advances in audio-text large language models (LLMs) have opened new possibilities for music understanding and generation. However, existing benchmarks are limited in scope, often relying on simplified tasks or multi-choice evaluations that fail to reflect the complexity of real-world music analysis. We reinterpret a broad range of traditional MIR annotations as instruction-following formats and introduce CMI-Bench, a comprehensive music instruction following benchmark designed to evaluate audio-text LLMs on a diverse set of music information retrieval (MIR) tasks. These include genre classification, emotion regression, emotion tagging, instrument classification, pitch estimation, key detection, lyrics transcription, melody extraction, vocal technique recognition, instrument performance technique detection, music tagging, music captioning, and (down)beat tracking: reflecting core challenges in MIR research. Unlike previous benchmarks, CMI-Bench adopts standardized evaluation metrics consistent with previous state-of-the-art MIR models, ensuring direct comparability with supervised approaches. We provide an evaluation toolkit supporting all open-source audio-textual LLMs, including LTU, Qwen-audio, SALMONN, MusiLingo, etc. Experiment results reveal significant performance gaps between LLMs and supervised models, along with their culture, chronological and gender bias, highlighting the potential and limitations of current models in addressing MIR tasks. CMI-Bench establishes a unified foundation for evaluating music instruction following, driving progress in music-aware LLMs.

AI models are riddled with culturally specific biases. A new data set, called SHADES, is designed to help developers combat the problem by spotting harmful stereotypes and other kinds of discrimination that emerge in AI chatbot responses across a wide range of languages. Why it matters: Although tools that spot stereotypes in AI models already exist, the vast majority of them work only on models trained in English. They identify stereotypes in models trained in other languages by relying on machine translations from English, which can fail to recognize stereotypes found only within certain non-English languages. To get around these problematic generalizations, SHADES was built using 16 languages from 37 geopolitical regions.

The world's electricity use will grow every year by more than the amount consumed annually by Japan because of a surge in electric transport, air conditioning and datacentres, according to the world's energy watchdog. The International Energy Agency has raised its predictions for the world's rising demand for electricity, pegging the growth at almost 4% a year until 2027, up from its previous forecast of 3.4% year. The influential Paris-based agency said the "new age of electricity" was dawning as a result of the climate crisis as more people begin to use air conditioning to cope with extreme temperature rises and economies begin to turn away from using fossil fuels in favour of cleaner power. More governments are taking steps to rely on electricity for transport and heating systems as well as heavy industry, according to the report, and there is also expected to be a rapid expansion of energy-hungry datacentres used to train artificial intelligence (AI). The forecasts are likely to stoke fears that the race to build more datacentres to support the boom in AI could become a drain on energy supplies, causing costs to rocket and stalling efforts to cut fossil fuels from power generation.

The Metaverse sounds like an entirely futuristic concept, but it's something that innovators have been dreaming about for decades. A term literally meaning "beyond universe," the Metaverse asks us to reimagine a future where we'll have a brand-new world to explore – one enhanced by the XR world, and the online environment. The Metaverse is a trending concept as we look at the future of work for the post-pandemic era. Teams trying to overcome headaches like video fatigue and hybrid meetings are increasingly considering the possibilities of XR for future interactions. In this landscape, the Metaverse represents an opportunity for innovation unlike anything we've ever seen.

A few weeks ago, I called my broadband provider about intermittent outages. The helpful customer support rep looked at my account and cheerfully told me that I could save money by switching to a different plan. A few minutes later, I had changed my plan to one that cost half as much and delivered comparable speeds. At first, I was happy. Because I realized, in reality, no customer service team is proactively looking out for my well-being before I raise a problem.

The chief scientist for the U.S. Space Force says human technological augmentation won't be optional in the future, and the U.S. will need to invest in it to keep pace with countries like Russia and China. Rather than radical redesigns of the human body, however, Joel Mozer proposes augmenting humans with artificial intelligence, including AI so advanced, it can advise commanders on tactics and keep track of complex problems. Mozer, a member of the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL), made the comments during an AFRL live event streamed on Facebook. "Today, we are on the brink of a new age, the age of human augmentation," Mozer said. "It's imperative that we embrace this new age, lest we fall behind our strategic competitors."

Artificial intelligence is a disruptive technology that finds more applications each day. But with each new innovation in artificial intelligence technologies like machine learning, deep learning, neural network, the possibilities to scale a new horizon in tech widens up. In the past few years, a form of neural network that is gaining popularity, i.e., Transformers. They employ a simple yet powerful mechanism called attention, which enables artificial intelligence models to selectively focus on certain parts of their input and thus reason more effectively. The attention-mechanism looks at an input sequence and decides at each step which other parts of the sequence are important.

We just released our new report, From Eyes to Ears: Getting Your Brand Heard in the New Age of'Voice,' which explores how organizations are preparing for a brand landscape dominated by voice. When it comes to transacting with the world, we're rapidly shifting from using our eyes to read text and our fingers to swipe, to using our voice and ears to talk and listen. Soon, voice interfaces will expand beyond smart speakers and be embedded in chatbots, applications, products and services. Whether digital or brick-and-mortar, businesses will have to pivot to voice to be heard by today's and tomorrow's customers. Perhaps the author and entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk summarizes the shift best: "Voice platforms are the equivalent of yet-to-be-discovered Malibu beachfront property, much like Twitter in 2006, Instagram in 2010 and Snapchat in 2012.