Tech & Society
DeepMind opened access to AlphaFold, a model that finds the shapes of proteins, and to its output so far — a potential cornucopia for biomedical research. The research lab, a division of Google’s parent company Alphabet, made AlphaFold freely available.
Machine Learning Research
To reconstruct the 3D world behind a set of 2D images, machine learning systems usually require a dedicated neural network for each scene. New research enables a single trained network to generate 3D reconstructions of multiple scenes.
Business
Language models are starting to take on programming work. SourceAI uses GPT-3 to translate plain-English requests into computer code in 40 programming languages. The French startup is one of several companies that use AI to ease coding.
Machine Learning Research
Bayes-optimal algorithms always make the best decisions given their training and input, if certain assumptions hold true. New work shows that some neural networks can approach this kind of performance.
Tech & Society
AI has humbled human chess masters. Now it’s helping them take the game to the next level. DeepMind and retired chess champion Vladimir Kramnik trained AlphaZero, a reinforcement learning model that bested human experts in chess, Go, and Shogi, to play-test changes in the rules.
Machine Learning Research
If the world changes every second and you take a picture every 10 seconds, you won’t have enough pictures to observe the changes clearly, and storing a series of pictures won’t help. On the other hand, if you take a picture every tenth of a second, then storing a history will help model the world.
Machine Learning Research
A protein’s biological function depends largely on its three-dimensional shape, but deducing its shape from its sequence of amino acids has been a longstanding problem. Researchers at DeepMind reveal how they used deep learning to solve the puzzle.
Machine Learning Research
AlphaGo Zero demonstrates superhuman performance playing Go, chess, and shogi. Models like R2D2 do the same playing classic Atari titles. A new approach to deep reinforcement learning is the first to achieve state-of-the-art results playing both board and video games.
Science
Computer vision has potential to spot cancer earlier and more accurately than human experts. A new system surpassed human accuracy in trials, but critics aren’t convinced.
Tech & Society
The future of machine learning may depend less on amassing ground-truth data than simulating the environment in which a model will operate. Deep learning works like magic with enough high-quality data. When examples are scarce, though, researchers are using simulation to fill the gap.
Tech & Society
Is there any reason to continue playing games that AI has mastered? Ask the former champions who have been toppled by machines.
Tech & Society
At the BlizzCon gaming convention last weekend, players of the strategy game StarCraft II stood in line to get walloped by DeepMind’s AI. After training for the better part of a year, the bot has become one of the world’s top players.