Letters
Pie & AI in Kuala Lumpur
Over the weekend, we hosted our first Pie & AI meetup in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in collaboration with the AI Malaysia group, MDEC, and ADAX. The event was part of Malaysia’s AI & Data Week 2019.
Analytics DeepLearning.AI
The Batch Newsletter
Robot Farm Workers, Making Algorithms Rock, Automating Contract Negotiations, Recognizing Accented Speech
Over the weekend, we hosted our first Pie & AI meetup in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in collaboration with the AI Malaysia group, MDEC, and ADAX. The event was part of Malaysia’s AI & Data Week 2019. Several people traveled from neighboring southeast Asian countries to attend!
Business
Automation’s Frontier: Fast Food
Quick-service restaurants are experiencing record-high employee turnover, while labor advocates are pushing for higher wages. Some experts say these forces are propelling the fast food industry toward full automation.
Machine Learning Research
Leveling the Playing Field
Deep reinforcement learning has given machines apparent hegemony in vintage Atari games, but their scores have been hard to compare — with one another or with human performance — because there are no rules governing what machines can and can’t do to win. Researchers aim to change that.
Tech & Society
Facing Down Deepfakes
Deepfakes threaten to undermine law and order, perhaps democracy itself. A coalition of tech companies, nonprofits, and academics joined forces to counter potential adverse impacts.
Science
Chimp Recognition
AI is capable of picking faces out of the crowd — even if that crowd is squabbling over bananas in a jungle. Researchers at the University of Oxford developed a face recognition app that identifies individual chimpanzees in footage shot in the wilds of Guinea.
Machine Learning Research
What Language Models Know
Watson set a high bar for language understanding in 2011, when it famously whipped human competitors in the televised trivia game show Jeopardy! IBM’s special-purpose AI required around $1 billion. Research suggests that today’s best language models can accomplish similar tasks right off the shelf.
Letters
Think Strategically, Not Tactically
When it comes to artificial intelligence, one of the biggest mistakes large companies make is thinking tactically rather than strategically. What’s the difference? Some taxi companies thought they had the internet...
The Batch Newsletter
The Batch: Autonomous Nuclear Weapons?!, Fighting Deepfakes, Recognizing Chimps, Automating Fast Food
When it comes to artificial intelligence, one of the biggest mistakes large companies make is thinking tactically rather than strategically. What’s the difference? Some taxi companies thought they had the internet revolution...
Tech & Society
Can AI Wage War? Should It?
The U.S. military is developing a new generation of automated weaponry. Some people are calling for automated generals as well.
Business
AI in the Real World
Theoretical advances can be thrilling, but the excitement can drown out all the ways AI is actually being put to use. DeepIndex provides an up-to-date, well organized, cheeky guide to practical applications culled from news reports.
Machine Learning Research
Honey, I Shrunk the Network!
Deep learning models can be unwieldy and often impractical to run on smaller devices without major modification. Researchers at Facebook AI Research found a way to compress neural networks with minimal sacrifice in accuracy.