Tech & Society
One of my favourite flavours of conversation is listening to reinforcement learning experts talk about their children as reinforcement learning agents. These conversations highlight just how comically far behind humans our machine learning models are.
Tech & Society
Before this past year, when I told people I worked in AI, more often than not I was met with a blank stare and sometimes a question along the lines of: “You mean like robots?”
Tech & Society
Only a year ago, ChatGPT woke the world up to the power of foundation models. But this power is not about shiny, jaw-dropping demos.
Tech & Society
The past year has seen incredible innovation in AI, and I expect as much or more in 2024. The coming year undoubtedly will be a year of rapid progress in models – multimodal, multilingual, and (hopefully) smaller and faster.
Tech & Society
The year 2023 was an inflection point in the development of broadly useful AI systems across text, image, video, audio, and other modalities. At Runway alone, we saw the release of video-generation models such as Gen-1 and Gen-2...
Letters
Last week, I attended the NeurIPS conference in New Orleans. It was fun to catch up with old friends, make new ones, and also get a wide scan of current AI research.
The Batch Newsletter
The Batch - AI News & Insights: Last week, I attended the NeurIPS conference in New Orleans. It was fun to catch up with old friends, make new ones, and also get a wide scan of current AI research.
Tech & Society
Fans of AI-driven music pressed play, while a major recording company reached for the stop button. AI grabbed listeners by the ears when it helped produce a new single by The Beatles, mimicked the voices of beloved stars, and generated music from text prompts.
Tech & Society
Angst at the prospect of intelligent machines boiled over in moves to block or limit the technology. Fear of AI-related doomsday scenarios prompted proposals to delay research and soul searching by prominent researchers. Amid the doomsaying, lawmakers took dramatic regulatory steps.
Tech & Society
Information may not want to be free after all. The age-old practice of training AI systems on data scraped from the web came into question as copyright owners sought to restrict AI developers from using their works without permission.
Tech & Society
The movie capital became a front line in the battle over workplace automation. U.S. film and television writers went on strike in May, and actors followed in July. They took up a variety of issues with their employers, but concern that AI would damage...
Year in Review
This year, AI became virtually synonymous with generative AI. Launched in November 2022, OpenAI’s ChatGPT ushered in a banner year for AI-driven generation of text, images, and an ever widening range of data types.