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.
Tech & Society
Tech & Society
Writer’s Unblock: Language models keep getting bigger and better.
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
The Model Will See You Now: The rise of medical AI in 2020
Institutional hurdles to AI for medicine began to fall, setting the stage for widespread clinical use of deep learning in medical devices and treatments. DeepMind’s AlphaFold model determined the three-dimensional shape of a protein in just hours.
Tech & Society
Algorithms Against Disinformation: How Facebook, Twitter, and more fought disinfo in 2020.
The worldwide pandemic and a contentious U.S. election whipped up a storm of automated disinformation, and some big AI companies reaped the whirlwind.
Tech & Society
Representing the Underrepresented: Many important AI datasets contain bias.
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
This Snowman Does Not Exist: The rise of deepfakes in 2020
While generative adversarial networks were infiltrating cultural, social, and scientific spheres, they quietly transformed the web into a bottomless well of synthetic images of . . . well, you name it.
Tech & Society
Coping With Covid: How AI helped fight Covid-19.
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.
Tech & Society
Written by Quill, Read by Computer: An AI system for reading historical handwriting
The secrets of history are locked in troves of handwritten documents. Now a machine learning platform is making them amenable to digital search. Transkribus is transcribing centuries-old records en masse and making them available to scholars worldwide.
Tech & Society
Labor Pushes Back: British labor unions take on automation.
Labor unions aim to give workers more protection against the automated systems that increasingly rule the workplace. The Trades Union Congress (TUC) launched a task force to lobby for collective bargaining, increased transparency, and legal protections related to AI in the workplace.
Tech & Society
Seeing Eye AI: AI app for visually impaired runners
A computer vision system is helping to keep runners with impaired vision on track.What’s new: A prototype smartphone app developed by Google translates camera images into audio signals.
Tech & Society
Prosperity of the Commons: Tools from MLCommons for improved model development
A new consortium of companies, schools, and research labs is building open tools for next-generation machine learning. MLCommons aims to foster innovation in machine learning by developing new benchmarks, datasets, and best practices.
Tech & Society
How to Drive a Balloon: How high-altitude balloons navigate using AI.
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.