If you give artificial intelligence a goal of maximizing profit, how far will it go? AI agents appear capable of lying, concealing, and colluding, according to new research from Harvard Business School.

Confidence is persuasive. In artificial intelligence systems, it is often misleading. Today's most capable reasoning models share a trait with the loudest voice in the room: They deliver every answer with the same unshakable certainty, whether they're right or guessing. Researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have now traced that overconfidence to a specific flaw in how these models are trained, and developed a method that fixes it without giving up any accuracy. The team's research is published on the arXiv preprint server.

Virtual reality (VR) experiences and 360-degree videos are transforming viewers from passive observers into active participants immersed within a scene. Yet this shift raises an important question: Where do people direct their attention in such environments, and what shapes that attention?

Most of what AI chatbots know about the world comes from devouring massive amounts of text from the internet—with all its facts, falsehoods, knowledge and nonsense. Given that input, is it possible that AI language models have an "understanding" of the real world? As it turns out, they do—or at least something like an understanding. That's according to a new study by researchers from Brown University to be presented on Saturday, April 25 at the International Conference on Learning Representations in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The study is published on the arXiv preprint server.

Language models like ChatGPT are not neutral. Without our realizing it, they can absorb all kinds of bias—for example, around gender and ethnicity—which then become increasingly embedded in the model. According to AI researcher Oskar van der Wal, we need different kinds of measurements to detect these biases so that they can be removed from the models. In his doctoral thesis, he shows how this can be done. On 29 April, he will defend his thesis at the University of Amsterdam.