Machine Learning Research
A neural network learned to read the genes of viruses as though they were text. That could enable researchers to page ahead for potentially dangerous mutations. Researchers at MIT trained a language model to predict mutations that would enable infectious viruses to become even more virulent.
Machine Learning Research
Detecting earthquakes is an important step toward warning surrounding communities that damaging seismic waves may be headed their way. A new model detects tremors and provides clues to their epicenter.
Tech & Society
Facebook expanded a system of vision, language, and speech models designed to open the social network to users who are visually impaired. A Facebook service that describes photos in a synthesized voice now recognizes 1,200 visual concepts — 10 times more than the previous version.
Machine Learning Research
Models that learn relationships between images and words are gaining a higher profile. New research shows that adversarial learning, usually a way to make models robust to deliberately misleading inputs, can boost vision-and-language performance.
Tech & Society
Two new models show a surprisingly sharp sense of the relationship between words and images. OpenAI, the for-profit research lab, announced a pair of models that have produced impressive results in multimodal learning: DALL·E.
Tech & Society
Can social media posts reveal early signs of mental illness? A new machine learning model shows promising results. Researchers developed a model that analyzes messages and images posted by Facebook users for indicators of psychological problems.
Interviews & Essays
The past year was the first in which general-purpose models became economically useful. GPT-3, in particular, demonstrated that large language models have surprising linguistic competence and the ability to perform a wide variety of useful tasks.
Interviews & Essays
In 2021, I envision that the AI community will create more tools to unleash human creativity. AI will help people across the globe to communicate and express emotions and moods in their own unique ways.
Interviews & Essays
The United States has been a leader in science and technology for decades, and all nations have benefitted from its innovations. But U.S. leadership in AI is not guaranteed.
Tech & Society
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
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
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.