Letters
The Power of Gratitude
Every year for the past decade, I flew to Singapore or Hong Kong to celebrate my mother’s birthday with her on December 22. This year, for the first time, we did it via Zoom.
Dec 23, 2020
The Batch Newsletter
The Batch: Biggest AI Stories of 2020: Covid Triage, Fun With GANs, Disinfo Whack-A-Mole, GPT Superstar, ImageNet Recall, FDA Approvals
Every year for the past decade, I flew to Singapore or Hong Kong to celebrate my mother’s birthday with her on December 22. This year, for the first time, we did it via Zoom.
Tech & Society
Writer’s Unblock: Language models keep getting bigger and better.
Neural networks for natural language processing got bigger, more prolific, and more fun to play with. Language models, which already had grown to gargantuan size, continued to swell, yielding chatbots that mimic AI luminaries and have very strange ideas about horses.
Tech & Society
The Model Will See You Now: The rise of medical AI in 2020
Institutional hurdles to AI for medicine began to fall, setting the stage for widespread clinical use of deep learning in medical devices and treatments. DeepMind’s AlphaFold model determined the three-dimensional shape of a protein in just hours.
Tech & Society
Algorithms Against Disinformation: How Facebook, Twitter, and more fought disinfo in 2020.
The worldwide pandemic and a contentious U.S. election whipped up a storm of automated disinformation, and some big AI companies reaped the whirlwind.
Tech & Society
Representing the Underrepresented: Many important AI datasets contain bias.
Some of deep learning’s bedrock datasets came under scrutiny as researchers combed them for built-in biases. Researchers found that popular datasets impart biases against socially marginalized groups to trained models due to the ways the datasets were compiled, labeled, and used.
Tech & Society
This Snowman Does Not Exist: The rise of deepfakes in 2020
While generative adversarial networks were infiltrating cultural, social, and scientific spheres, they quietly transformed the web into a bottomless well of synthetic images of . . . well, you name it.
Tech & Society
Coping With Covid: How AI helped fight Covid-19.
AI accelerated the search for a coronavirus vaccine, detected Covid-19 cases, and otherwise softened the pandemic’s blow. Machine learning researchers worldwide scrambled to harness the technology against the coronavirus.