Letters
A student once asked me, “Can an AI ever love?”Since the early days of AI, people have wondered whether AI can ever be conscious or feel emotions. Even though an artificial general intelligence may be centuries away, these are important questions.
Tech & Society
Some self-driving cars can’t tell the difference between a person in the roadway and an image projected on the street. A team of researchers used projectors to trick semiautonomous vehicles into detecting people, road signs, and lane markings that didn’t exist.
Machine Learning Research
In an online dating profile, the photo that highlights your physical beauty may not be the one that makes you look smart or honest — also important traits in a significant other. A new neural network helps pick the most appealing shots.
Tech & Society
Chinese tech giants have opened their AI platforms to scientists fighting coronavirus. Alibaba Cloud and Baidu are offering a powerful weapon to life-science researchers working to stop the spread of the illness officially known as Covid-19: free access to their computing horsepower and tools.
Machine Learning Research
Female giant pandas are fertile for only 24 to 36 hours a year: Valentine’s Day on steroids. A new neural network alerts human keepers when a panda couple mates.
Science
Severe heat waves and cold snaps are especially hard to forecast because atmospheric perturbations can have effects that are difficult to compute. Neural networks show promise where typical methods have stumbled.
The Batch Newsletter
Many of us apply labels to ourselves that shape our identity. Some say, “I’m a sports fan,” and this attitude motivates behaviors such as cheering for the home team. Others identify themselves as introverts, extroverts, vegetarians, gamers, athletes, scientists, and/or engineers.
Letters
Many of us apply labels to ourselves that shape our identity. Some say, “I’m a sports fan,” and this attitude motivates behaviors such as cheering for the home team. Others identify themselves as introverts, extroverts, vegetarians, gamers...
Business
Robots are moving into a job that traditionally required the human touch.What’s new: A commercial warehouse that ships electrical supplies deployed AI-driven robotic arms from Covariant, a high-profile Silicon Valley robotics firm.
Tech & Society
Androids may not dream of electric sheep, but some crack jokes about horses and cows. Meena, a 2.6-billion parameter chatbot developed by Google Brain, showed impressive conversational ability, discussing a variety of topics.
Science
A drug designed by AI has been approved for testing in humans. A UK startup focused on automated drug discovery teamed up with a Japanese pharmaceutical company to produce a new medicine for obsessive compulsive disorder.
Machine Learning Research
A protein’s biological function depends largely on its three-dimensional shape, but deducing its shape from its sequence of amino acids has been a longstanding problem. Researchers at DeepMind reveal how they used deep learning to solve the puzzle.