Physics

It’s an exciting time for AI, with fascinating advances in generated media and many other applications, some even in science and medicine. Some folks may dream about what more AI can create and how much bigger models we may engineer.

Engineers who design aircraft, aqueducts, and other objects that interact with air and water use numerical simulations to test potential shapes, but they rely on trial and error to improve their designs. A neural simulator can optimize the shape itself.

Nuclear fusion technology, long touted as an unlimited source of safe, clean energy, took a step toward reality with a machine learning algorithm that molds the fuel in a reactor’s core.

Computer simulations do a good job of modeling physical systems from traffic patterns to rocket engines, but they can take a long time to run. New work takes advantage of deep learning to speed them up.

Geologists call them slow slips: deep, low-frequency earthquakes that can last a month but have little effect on the surface. A model trained to predict such events could help with forecasting potentially catastrophic quakes.

The White House called for new funding for AI research including a constellation of research centers. Nonetheless, the U.S. government’s annual spending on the technology still would lag behind that of several other...

People granted early access to OpenAI’s latest language model are raving about its way with words — and more. Beta testers of GPT-3 are showing off the model’s ability to write business memos, craft blogs, pen tweets, and even generate computer code.

Are your scientist friends intimidated by machine learning? They might be inspired by a primer from one of the world’s premier tech titans. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Cornell PhD candidate Maithra Raghu school scientists in machine learning in a sprawling overview.

Would you like an umbrella that fits in your pocket? Researchers used machine learning to invent sturdy but collapsible materials that might lead to such a fantastical object.

A leaked paper from Google’s quantum computing lab claims “supremacy” over conventional computers. The U.S. space agency NASA, whose scientists are collaborating with Google on a quantum computer, accidentally published a paper describing the breakthrough.