Hardware
A major corporate acquisition could reshape the hardware that makes AI tick.What’s new: U.S. processor giant Nvidia, the world’s leading vendor of the graphics processing units (GPUs) that perform calculations for deep learning, struck a deal to purchase UK chip designer Arm for $40 billion.
Hardware
Chips specially designed for AI are becoming much faster at training neural networks, judging from recent trials. MLPerf, an organization that’s developing standards for hardware performance in machine learning tasks, released results from its third benchmark competition.
Tech & Society
Generative adversarial networks don’t just produce pretty pictures. They can build world models, too. A GAN generated a fully functional replica of the classic video game Pac-Man.
Machine Learning Research
AI is good at tracking objects in two dimensions. A new model processes video from a camera with a depth sensor to predict how objects move through space.
Business
The business world continues to shape deep learning’s future. Commerce is pushing AI toward more efficient consumption of data, energy, and labor, according to a report on trends in machine learning from market analyst CB Insights.
Interviews & Essays
We’ve had great success with supervised deep learning on labeled data. Now it’s time to explore other ways to learn: training on unlabeled data, lifelong learning, and especially letting models explore a simulated environment before transferring what they learn to the real world.
Machine Learning Research
Reinforcement learning trains models by trial and error. In batch reinforcement learning (BRL), models learn by observing many demonstrations by a variety of actors. But what if one doctor is handier with a scalpel while another excels at suturing?
Tech & Society
Pilots in drone races fly souped-up quadcopters around an obstacle course at 120 miles per hour. But soon they may be out of a job, as race organizers try to spice things up with drones controlled by AI.