Jun 26, 2019
Self-Driving Data Deluge
Teaching a neural network to drive requires immense quantities of real-world sensor data. Now developers have a mother lode to mine.
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Jun 26, 2019
Between Consenting Electrons
Electrons are notoriously fickle things, orbiting one proton, then another, their paths described in terms of probability. Scientists can observe their travel indirectly using scanning tunneling microscopes, but...
Jun 26, 2019
Word Salad
Language models lately have become so good at generating coherent text that some researchers hesitate to release them for fear they'll be misused to auto-generate disinformation.
Jun 26, 2019
The Birds and the Buzz
Experts in animal cognition may be the AI industry’s secret weapon. Tech giants like Apple and Google have added neuroscientists studying rodents, birds, and fish to teams working on voice processing, sound recognition, and navigation.
Jun 26, 2019
Goodnight, Sweet Bot
Jibo made the cutest household robots on Earth, jointed desk-lamp affairs that wriggle as they chat and play music. In March — a mere 18 months after coming to life — they said goodbye to their owners en masse.
Jun 26, 2019
Wandering Star
Robots rely on GPS and prior knowledge of the world to move around without bumping into things. Humans don’t communicate with positioning satellites, yet they’ve wandered confidently, if obliviously, for millennia. A new navigation technology mimics that ability.
The Batch Newsletter
The Batch: AI Jobs in Flux, Robot Tanks, Deepfakes in DC, Psychosis Detection
Last Friday, I attended the International Conference on Machine Learning. I spoke at the AI and Climate Change workshop on projects we’re doing to model methane emissions and on wind turbines. John Platt gave an overview of climate issues.
Jun 19, 2019
The AI Job Market Shifts
Tech giants have slowed down their hiring for pure AI research. But don’t let that cool your ambitions. A journalist spoke with six industry insiders about hiring trends. His sources said their companies no longer are building huge research teams. Instead, they’re staffing up AI engineering.
Jun 19, 2019
3D Shapes From 2D Pictures
Images produced by generative adversarial networks can be nearly indistinguishable from the real thing. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a GAN-made 3D representation could be worth a million.
Jun 19, 2019
The Sound of Psychosis
Neuroscientists developed a system that, they say, can detect subtle signs of psychosis in conversational speech.
Jun 19, 2019
Robots Can Learn From Mistakes
Typical deep reinforcement learning requires millions of training iterations as the network stumbles around in search of the right solution. New research suggests that AI can learn faster by considering its mistakes.
Jun 19, 2019
Mr. Deepfake Goes to Washington
U.S. representatives mulled over legal precedents for — and impediments to — regulating the realistic computer-generated videos known as deepfakes.