Letters
Values for the AI Community
Earlier this week, I asked a question on social media: What is the most important problem that the AI community should work on? Thousands of you responded. The most frequently mentioned themes included...
Analytics DeepLearning.AI
The Batch Newsletter
The Batch: Apple's AI Strategy, Retail Surveillance, Clothes That Fight Face Recognition, Suboptimal Optimizers
Earlier this week, I asked a question on social media: What is the most important problem that the AI community should work on? Thousands of you responded. The most frequently mentioned themes included...
Hardware
New Horsepower for Neural Nets: UK startup Graphcore released its Colossus MK2 chip for AI.
A high-profile semiconductor startup made a bid for the future of AI computation. UK startup Graphcore released the Colossus Mk2, a processor intended to perform the matrix math calculations at the heart of deep learning more efficiently than other specialized processors.
Hardware
Built for Speed: Nvidia topped MLPerf's training benchmarks in 2020.
Chips specially designed for AI are becoming much faster at training neural networks, judging from recent trials. MLPerf, an organization that’s developing standards for hardware performance in machine learning tasks, released results from its third benchmark competition.
Machine Learning Research
Transforming Pixels: An image generation model using the GPT architecture
Language models like Bert, Ernie, and Elmo have achieved spectacular results based on clever pre-training approaches. New research applies some of those Sesame Street lessons into image processing.
Tech & Society
AI Steps Up: This prosthetic leg uses AI to learn a human-like stride.
A prosthetic leg that learns from the user’s motion could help amputees walk more naturally. Researchers from the University of Utah designed a robotic leg that uses machine learning to generate a human-like stride.
Letters
Making AI Fair, Accountable, and Reliable
I spoke last week at the National Intergovernmental Audit Forum, a meeting attended by U.S. federal, state, and local government auditors. (Apparently some of the organizers had taken AI for Everyone.)
The Batch Newsletter
The Batch: Faster AI Chips, Smarter Prosthetic Legs, Transformers for Image Processing, Humbling Overconfident Models
I spoke last week at the National Intergovernmental Audit Forum, a meeting attended by U.S. federal, state, and local government auditors. (Apparently some of the organizers had taken AI for Everyone.)
Machine Learning Research
Cats Cured of Covid: Why some deep learning models thought cats had Covid
Neural networks are famously bad at interpreting input that falls outside the training set’s distribution, so it’s not surprising that some models are certain that cat pictures show symptoms of Covid-19. A new approach won’t mistakenly condemn your feline to a quarantine.
Machine Learning Research
Eyes on the Prize: Vision-only reinforcement learning improves generalizability.
When the chips are down, humans can track critical details without being distracted by irrelevancies. New research helps reinforcement learning models similarly focus on the most important details.
Tech & Society
AI Against Covid Progress Report: How Chinese authorities used AI to fight Covid
A new report details the role of AI in China’s effort to fight the coronavirus. Researchers at Synced, a China-based AI publication, describe how nearly 90 machine learning products have contributed to the country’s pandemic response.
Machine Learning Research
Less (Video) is More (Examples): A small data AI tool for classifying video
We’d all love to be able to find similar examples of our favorite cat videos. But few of us want to label thousands of similar videos of even the cutest kitties. New research makes headway in video classification when training examples are scarce.