Artificial brains are helping scientists study the real thing
No model is perfect. But that doesn’t stop them being useful
The striking progress in artificial intelligence over the past decade is mostly down to advances in machine learning, whereby computers teach themselves complicated tasks by crunching large quantities of data, rather than having to be programmed directly by humans. This approach has driven rapid progress in computer vision, language translation and, most recently, the human-like conversational skills of chatbots such as GPT-4.
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This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline “Brains in a box”
From the May 27th 2023 edition
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