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Artificial intelligence

An AI learns to spot tree species, with help from a drone

A consumer-grade drone can take photos of trees from above that are good enough to train a deep-learning algorithm to tell different species apart.

Details: The team behind the project flew drone over a forest in Kyoto, Japan, to take photos and then divided some of them into seven categories: six types of trees and one called “others,” for images that captured bare land or buildings.

Results: After some fiddling, the algorithm (which was on an earth-bound computer) achieved 89 percent accuracy overall.

Why it matters: Forest surveys typically use expensive systems outfitted with lidar or specialized cameras. This commercially available setup could be a cheap way to automate tree surveys, and the algorithm could be retrained to aid in disaster response, check pipelines for leaks, or help with other monitoring efforts that need to quickly cover a large area.

Deep Dive

Artificial intelligence

Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why.

And that's a problem. Figuring it out is one of the biggest scientific puzzles of our time and a crucial step towards controlling more powerful future models.

OpenAI teases an amazing new generative video model called Sora

The firm is sharing Sora with a small group of safety testers but the rest of us will have to wait to learn more.

Google’s Gemini is now in everything. Here’s how you can try it out.

Gmail, Docs, and more will now come with Gemini baked in. But Europeans will have to wait before they can download the app.

Google DeepMind’s new generative model makes Super Mario–like games from scratch

Genie learns how to control games by watching hours and hours of video. It could help train next-gen robots too.

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Illustration by Rose Wong

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