News & Comment

Speech technology offers many applications to enhance employee productivity and efficiency. Yet new dangers arise for marginalized groups, potentially jeopardizing organizational efforts to promote workplace diversity. Our analysis delves into three critical risks of speech technology and offers guidance for mitigating these risks responsibly.

The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) of the test set is used throughout machine learning (ML) for assessing a model’s performance. However, when concordance is not the only ambition, this gives only a partial insight into performance, masking distribution shifts of model outputs and model instability.

After several decades of developments in AI, has the inspiration that can be drawn from neuroscience been exhausted? Recent initiatives make the case for taking a fresh look at the intersection between the two fields.

Although federated learning is often seen as a promising solution to allow AI innovation while addressing privacy concerns, we argue that this technology does not fix all underlying data ethics concerns. Benefiting from federated learning in digital health requires acknowledgement of its limitations.

Can non-state multinational tech companies counteract the potential democratic deficit in the emerging global governance of AI? We argue that although they may strengthen core values of democracy such as accountability and transparency, they currently lack the right kind of authority to democratize global AI governance.

One of the most successful areas for deep learning in scientific discovery has been protein predictions and engineering. We take a closer look at four studies in this issue that advance protein science with innovative deep learning approaches.

The “My Seizure Gauge” competition explored the challenge of forecasting epileptic seizures using non-invasive wearable devices without an electroencephalogram. The organizers and the winning team reflect on their experiences.

We reflect on five years of Nature Machine Intelligence and on providing a venue for discussions in AI.

For our fifth anniversary, we reconnected with authors of recent Comments and Perspectives in Nature Machine Intelligence and asked them how the topic they wrote about developed. We also wanted to know what other topics in AI they found exciting, surprising or worrying, and what their hopes and expectations are for AI in 2024—and the next five years. A recurring theme is the ongoing developments in large language models and generative AI, their transformative effect on the scientific process and concerns about ethical implications.

Looking back at a year of escalating, divisive debates in AI safety and who determines the agenda.

Borrowing the format of public competitions from engineering and computer science, a new type of challenge in 2023 tested real-world AI applications with legal assessments based on the EU AI Act.

Further progress in AI may require learning algorithms to generate their own data rather than assimilate static datasets. A Perspective in this issue proposes that they could do so by interacting with other learning agents in a socially structured way.

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has relied on an increasing demand for energy, which threatens to outweigh its promised positive effects. To steer AI onto a more sustainable path, quantifying and comparing its energy consumption is key.

AI-generated media are on the rise and are here to stay. Regulation is urgently needed, but in the meantime creators, users and content distributors need to pursue various ways, and adopt various tools, for responsible generation, sharing and detection of AI-generated content.

Advances in DNA nanoengineering promise the development of new computing devices within biological systems, with applications in nanoscale sensing, diagnostics and therapeutics.