Letters
Trading on AI: The GameStop Phenomenon
The price of shares in video game retailer GameStop (NYSE: GME) gyrated wildly last week. Many people viewed the stock’s rapid ascent as a David-versus-Goliath story...
Tech & Society
Tech & Society
Drones Unleashed: FAA authorizes AI drones beyond line of sight.
U.S. regulators for the first time allowed commercial operators of autonomous aerial vehicles to fly out of operators’ sight. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration authorized drone maker American Robotics to fly without requirement.
Tech & Society
Every Picture Tells a Story: Facebook expands automated alternative text.
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.
Tech & Society
AI Versus Lead Poisoning: How BlueConduit uses AI to identify lead water lines.
An algorithm is helping cities locate pipes that could release highly toxic lead into drinking water. BlueConduit, a startup that focuses on water safety, is working with dozens of North American municipal governments to locate lead water lines so they can be replaced.
Tech & Society
The Fax About Tracking Covid: A deep learning system for sorting critical Covid-19 cases.
A pair of neural networks is helping to prioritize Covid-19 cases for contact tracing. The public health department of California’s Contra Costa County is using deep learning to sort Covid-19 cases reported via the pre-internet technology known as fax.
Tech & Society
Tell Me a Picture: OpenAI's two new multimodal AI models, CLIP and DALL·E
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
AI Truths, AI Falsehoods: How police used face detection to ID Jan 6 rioters.
Face recognition is being used to identify people involved in last week’s assault on the U.S. Capitol. It’s also being misused to support their cause.
Letters
How AI Can Strengthen Democracy
Last Wednesday, the U.S. Capitol building was overrun by insurrectionists at the moment when members of Congress were certifying the results of a national election.
Tech & Society
U.S. New Year’s Resolutions for AI: All the AI programs authorized in the 2021 NDAA.
U.S. lawmakers authorized a slew of national programs that promote artificial intelligence research, development, and deployment, and support efforts to make sure the results are ethical and trustworthy.
Tech & Society
Online Clues to Mental Illness: NLP model spots signs of mental illness in Facebook posts.
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.
Letters
AI Concentrates Power and Wealth
In my letter last week, I alluded to the way AI tends to concentrate power and wealth. This tendency worries me, and I believe it deserves more attention. The U.S. government has been looking into these winner-take-most dynamics at a few leading technology companies...
Letters
Happy New Year! Three Aspirations for AI in 2021
Happy New Year! As we enter 2021, I want to share with you three wishes I have for AI in the upcoming year. I hope we can: Narrow the gap between proofs-of-concept and production.