What's up in

Artificial intelligence

Latest Articles

AI Is Nothing Like a Brain, and That’s OK

April 30, 2025

The brain’s astounding cellular diversity and networked complexity could show how to make AI better.

The Strange Physics That Gave Birth to AI

April 30, 2025

Modern thinking machines owe their existence to insights from the physics of complex materials.

Introducing The Quanta Podcast

April 30, 2025

Exploring the distant universe, the insides of cells, the abstractions of math, the complexity of information itself and much more, The Quanta Podcast will be a tour of the frontier between the known and the unknown.

Q&A

Improving Deep Learning With a Little Help From Physics

April 23, 2025

Rose Yu has a plan for how to make AI better, faster and smarter — and it’s already yielding results.

To Make Language Models Work Better, Researchers Sidestep Language

April 14, 2025

We insist that large language models repeatedly translate their mathematical processes into words. There may be a better way.

Q&A

Where Does Meaning Live in a Sentence? Math Might Tell Us.

April 9, 2025

The mathematician Tai-Danae Bradley is using category theory to try to understand both human and AI-generated language.

Intelligence Evolved at Least Twice in Vertebrate Animals

April 7, 2025

Complex neural pathways likely arose independently in birds and mammals, suggesting that vertebrates evolved intelligence multiple times.

Why Do Researchers Care About Small Language Models?

March 10, 2025

Larger models can pull off greater feats, but the accessibility and efficiency of smaller models make them attractive tools.

Q&A

The Physicist Working to Build Science-Literate AI

February 28, 2025

By training machine learning models with enough examples of basic science, Miles Cranmer hopes to push the pace of scientific discovery forward.

Get highlights of the most important news delivered to your email inbox