The past year was the first in which general-purpose models became economically useful. GPT-3, in particular, demonstrated that large language models have surprising linguistic competence and the ability to perform a wide variety of useful tasks.

Helium balloons that beam internet service to hard-to-serve areas are using AI to navigate amid high-altitude winds. Loon, the Alphabet division that provides wireless internet via polyethylene blimps.

A fighter pilot battled a true-to-life virtual enemy in midair. In the skies over southern California, an airman pitted his dogfighting skills against an AI-controlled opponent that was projected onto his augmented-reality visor.

A new multimedia experience lets audience members help artificially intelligent creatures work together to survive. Agence, an interactive virtual reality (VR) project blends audience participation with reinforcement learning to create an experience that’s half film, half video game.

New research teaches robots to anticipate what’s coming rather than focusing on what’s right in front of them. Researchers developed Occupancy Anticipation (OA), a navigation system that predicts unseen obstacles in addition to observing those in its field of view.

AI has humbled human chess masters. Now it’s helping them take the game to the next level. DeepMind and retired chess champion Vladimir Kramnik trained AlphaZero, a reinforcement learning model that bested human experts in chess, Go, and Shogi, to play-test changes in the rules.

An autonomous fighter pilot shot down a human aerial ace in virtual combat. Built by defense contractor Heron Systems, the system also defeated automated rivals from seven other companies to win the AlphaDogfight trial.

If the world changes every second and you take a picture every 10 seconds, you won’t have enough pictures to observe the changes clearly, and storing a series of pictures won’t help. On the other hand, if you take a picture every tenth of a second, then storing a history will help model the world.

A strategy manifesto from one of China’s biggest tech companies declares, amid familiar visions of ubiquitous AI, that deepfakes are more boon than bane.

People who take driving lessons during daytime don’t need instruction in driving at night. They recognize that the difference doesn’t disturb their knowledge of how to drive. Similarly, a new reinforcement learning method manages superficial variations in the environment without re-training.

A prosthetic leg that learns from the user’s motion could help amputees walk more naturally. Researchers from the University of Utah designed a robotic leg that uses machine learning to generate a human-like stride.

When the chips are down, humans can track critical details without being distracted by irrelevancies. New research helps reinforcement learning models similarly focus on the most important details.

How do you control a video game that generates a host of unique monsters for every match? With machine learning, naturally. The otherworldly creatures in Source of Madness learn how to target players through reinforcement learning.

Reinforcement learning can beat humans at video games, but humans are better at coming up with strategies to master more complex tasks. New work enables neural networks to connect the dots.

Governments have struggled to find a tax formula that promotes prosperity without creating extremes of wealth and poverty. Can machine learning show the way?