Letters
Pie & AI Turns 100!
I’m proud to announce that we held the 100th Pie & AI last Friday. Pie & AI is our meetup series that brings together members of the AI community worldwide for education, conversation, and a slice of pie.
Analytics DeepLearning.AI
Tech & Society
Playing With GANs: GameGAN generated a fully functional Pac-Man.
Generative adversarial networks don’t just produce pretty pictures. They can build world models, too. A GAN generated a fully functional replica of the classic video game Pac-Man.
Tech & Society
Do Oil and Algorithms Mix?: Amazon, Google, and Microsoft built AI tools for big oil.
Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are developing machine learning tools for the fossil fuel industry even as they pledge to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
Business
Text to Video in Two Minutes: Baidu's VidPress generates video from text.
Will reading soon become obsolete? A new system converts text articles into videos. VidPress, a prototype project from Chinese tech giant Baidu, currently generates more than 1,000 narrated video summaries of news stories daily.
Machine Learning Research
Big Bot Makes Small Talk: A research summary of Facebook's Generative BST chatbot
Facebook recently rolled out its entry in the World’s Biggest Chatbot sweepstakes. In keeping with the company’s social-networking dominance, the bot is designed to excel at chitchat on any subject.
Machine Learning Research
Toward Open-Domain Chatbots: Meena Scores High on System for Grading NLP Chatbots
Progress in language models is spawning a new breed of chatbots and, unlike their narrow-domain forebears, they have the gift of gab. Recent research tests the limits of conversational AI.
Hardware
Horsepower for Next-Gen Networks: Microsoft built OpenAI a custom AI supercomputer.
The for-profit research organization OpenAI has a new supercomputer to help achieve its dream of building the world’s most sophisticated AI. Microsoft engineered the new hardware network to train immense models on thousands of images, texts, and videos simultaneously.
The Batch Newsletter
The Batch: Covid-19 Infects AI, Learning from Small Data, Generated Music Goes Mainstream, Fighting Pandemic Disinformation
I recently received an email from one of you who lives far from the major AI hubs, saying, “I feel like I’m all alone.” I want to tell you all: Even if it sometimes feels like you’re facing the challenges of work and life in isolation, you are not alone!
Letters
Staying Connected Amid the Pandemic
I recently received an email from one of you who lives far from the major AI hubs, saying, “I feel like I’m all alone.” I want to tell you all...
Tech & Society
New Behaviors Derail Old Training: How Covid-19 impacted the AI behind online shopping
The pandemic has radically altered online shopping behavior, throwing a wrench into many AI systems. AI inventory trackers, recommendation algorithms, and fraud detection systems trained on pre-pandemic consumer behavior have been flummoxed by the different ways people now browse, binge, and buy.
Machine Learning Research
Small Data the Simple Way: A training technique that can outperform few-shot learning
Few-shot learning seeks to build models that adapt to novel tasks based on small numbers of training examples. This sort of learning typically involves complicated techniques, but researchers achieved state-of-the-art results using a simpler approach.
Tech & Society
Crowdsourcing a Cure: Covid Moonshot, the crowdsourced effort to find a cure
Researchers are drawing up blueprints for drugs to fight Covid-19. Machine learning is identifying those most likely to be effective. Covid Moonshot, an international group of scientists in academia and industry, is crowdsourcing designs for molecules with potential to thwart the coronavirus.