Hardware
Size Matters
Silicon Valley startup Cerebras shifted out of stealth mode to unveil its flagship product: an enormous chip designed from the ground up to accelerate neural networks.
Latest
Machine Learning Research
Scaling Bayes
Neural networks are good at making predictions, but they’re not so good at estimating how certain they are. If the training data set is small and many sets of model parameters fit the data well, for instance, the network may not realize this explicitly, leading to overly confident predictions.
Tech & Society
Second Sight
Unlike bats, humans can’t see with their ears. Now an app is giving sightless pedestrians the ability to navigate by ear. Microsoft’s Artificial Intelligence and Research Laboratory offers a free iPhone app called Soundscape.
Science
In a Galaxy Far, Far Away
The origin of the brief, high-intensity signals from outer space called fast radio bursts baffles astronomers. Now AI is generating real-time data to help solve the mystery.
Machine Learning Research
Get Your Kicks With DRL
Researchers typically test deep reinforcement learning algorithms on games from Space Invaders to StarCraft. The Google Brain team in Zurich adds another option: football, also known as soccer.
Letters
Pie & AI in Medellin
We ended a busy week in Colombia hosting a Pie & AI meetup in Medellín. I met hundreds of engineers and business professionals excited to take the next step in their AI careers. I was energized by the enthusiasm the Colombia community had...
The Batch Newsletter
The Batch: Gunning for GPUs, Football for DRL, Navigation for the Blind, Mystery Signals From Outer Space
We ended a busy week in Colombia hosting a Pie & AI meetup in Medellín. I met hundreds of engineers and business professionals excited to take the next step in their AI careers. I was energized by the enthusiasm the Colombia community had for collaborating...
Machine Learning Research
Style Upgrade
Image-to-image translation, in which stylistic features from one image are imposed on the content of another to create a new picture, traditionally has been limited to translating either shapes or textures. A new network translates both.
Tech & Society
Standards in the Making
The U.S. federal government released a plan to develop technical standards for artificial intelligence, seeking to balance its aim to maintain the nation’s tech leadership and economic power with a priority on AI safety and trustworthiness.
Machine Learning Research
BERT Is Back
Less than a month after XLNet overtook BERT, the pole position in natural language understanding changed hands again. RoBERTa is an improved BERT pretraining recipe that beats its forbear, becoming the new state-of-the-art language model — for the moment.
Business
DeepMind Results Raise Questions
Alphabet subsidiary DeepMind lost $572 million in the past year, and its losses over the last three years amounted to more than $1 billion. AI contrarian Gary Marcus used the news as an opportunity to question the direction of AI as an industry.
Tech & Society
This Shirt Hates Surveillance
Automatic license plate readers capture thousands of vehicle IDs each minute, allowing law enforcement and private businesses to track drivers with or without their explicit consent.