Hardware
A neural network wrote the blueprint for upcoming computer chips that will accelerate deep learning itself. Google engineers used a reinforcement learning system to arrange the billions of minuscule transistors in an upcoming version of its Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) chips.
Science
Surgical robots perform millions of delicate operations annually under human control. Now they’re getting ready to operate on their own.
Tech & Society
Drone startups are taking aim at military customers. As large tech companies have backed away from defense work, startups like Anduril, Shield AI, and Teal are picking up the slack. They’re developing autonomous fliers specifically for military operations.
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.
Machine Learning Research
World models, which learn a compressed representation of a dynamic environment like, say, a video game, have delivered top results in reinforcement learning. A new method makes them much smaller.
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.
Tech & Society
Helium balloons that beam internet service to hard-to-serve areas are using AI to navigate amid high-altitude winds. Loon, the Alphabet division that provides wireless internet via polyethylene blimps.
Tech & Society
A fighter pilot battled a true-to-life virtual enemy in midair. In the skies over southern California, an airman pitted his dogfighting skills against an AI-controlled opponent that was projected onto his augmented-reality visor.
Tech & Society
A new multimedia experience lets audience members help artificially intelligent creatures work together to survive. Agence, an interactive virtual reality (VR) project blends audience participation with reinforcement learning to create an experience that’s half film, half video game.
Machine Learning Research
New research teaches robots to anticipate what’s coming rather than focusing on what’s right in front of them. Researchers developed Occupancy Anticipation (OA), a navigation system that predicts unseen obstacles in addition to observing those in its field of view.
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.