TED Tech

When it comes to preparing for an interview or making an important life decision, more and more people are turning to AI for advice. ChatGPT’s new voice interface, Advanced Voice Mode, allows users to speak out loud and converse with a chatbot as they would with another human — but is it really as seamless as a chat with a friend? Bilawal runs a series of experiments with Advanced Voice Mode to test the limits of this new technology and its potential uses, from weighing the pros and cons of a cross-country move to coaching an intense personal workout. He and producer Dominic Girard discuss the potential benefits and dangers of this new advancement, and ask perhaps the most important question of all: Can ChatGPT pronounce Bilawal’s name?  For transcripts for The TED AI Show, visit go.ted.com/TTAIS-transcripts    

Can strawberries grown inside a building taste sweeter than those grown in a field? Farming entrepreneur Hiroki Koga explores how his team is combining solar-powered vertical farms with AI, robotics and indoor bee colonies to grow delicious strawberries year-round — and how this practice, if widely adopted, could deliver a harvest of benefits for the future of food. After the talk, Sherrell dives deeper into the impact of vertical farming. 

We’ve had conversations about AI’s online influence on politics, from deepfakes to misinformation. But AI can also have profound effects on hardware – especially when it comes to national security and military capabilities like weapons and stealth technologies. Kathleen Fisher is an office director at DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency tasked with the research and development of emerging technologies for use by the U.S. military. Despite its bureaucratic name, DARPA is anything but conventional – and they’re solving problems that are thrillingly complex. Kathleen shares how her team employs nimble thinking to understand the state of AI across the globe. Then, she and Bilawal discuss the strategies needed to embrace the possibilities –and challenges– of AI now, and what we need to do to build a sustainable future. For transcripts for The TED AI Show, visit go.ted.com/TTAIS-transcripts 

Stars have cores hot and dense enough to force atomic nuclei together, forming larger, heavier nuclei in a process known as fusion. In this process, the mass of the end products is slightly less than the mass of the initial atoms. But that “lost” mass doesn’t disappear — it’s converted to energy ... a lot of energy. So, can we harness this energy to power the world? George Zaidan investigates. This TED-Ed lesson was directed by Igor Ćorić, Artrake Studio, narrated by George Zaidan and the music is by Cem Misirlioglu and Brooks Ball.

Many people associate innovation with secrecy—privately toiling away on a project until you're ready to share it with the world. While that may work for some, there's a benefit to putting all your cards on the table. Bilawal sits down for a conversation with Thomas Wolf, whose company Hugging Face pivoted from privately building an AI chatbot to sharing all of its knowledge with a growing online community. Thomas discusses the history of Hugging Face, why embracing open source development has shifted the trajectory of AI, and how open source can challenge existing power structures in the AI world. For transcripts for The TED AI Show, visit go.ted.com/TTAIS-transcripts