Tech & Society
Facing a tsunami of user-generated disinformation, YouTube is scrambling to stop its recommendation algorithm from promoting videos that spread potentially dangerous falsehoods.
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.
Tech & Society
An open source library could spawn trillion-parameter neural networks and help small-time developers build big-league models. Microsoft upgraded DeepSpeed, a library that accelerates the PyTorch deep learning framework.
Tech & Society
Some politicians and pundits believe that, in the AI era, the military with the most data wins. A new analysis disputes this notion. A report by Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology examines the relative strengths of the Chinese and U.S. militaries in AI.
Letters
Today we take it for granted that many people know how to read and write. Someday, I hope, it will be just as common that people know how to write code. Several hundred years ago, society didn’t view language literacy as a necessary skill.
Tech & Society
The White House called for new funding for AI research including a constellation of research centers. Nonetheless, the U.S. government’s annual spending on the technology still would lag behind that of several other...
Tech & Society
Covid shut down the tennis tournament at Wimbledon this year, but a new model simulates showdowns between the sport’s greatest players. Stanford researchers developed Vid2Player, a system that simulates the footwork, positioning, and strokes of tennis pros like Roger Federer.
Tech & Society
An autonomous fighter pilot shot down a human aerial ace in virtual combat. Built by defense contractor Heron Systems, the system also defeated automated rivals from seven other companies to win the AlphaDogfight trial.
Tech & Society
The UK government abandoned a plan to use machine learning to assess students for higher education. The UK Department of Education discarded grades generated by an algorithm designed to predict performance on the annual Advanced Level qualifications, which had been canceled due to the pandemic.
Tech & Society
A strategy manifesto from one of China’s biggest tech companies declares, amid familiar visions of ubiquitous AI, that deepfakes are more boon than bane.
Tech & Society
AI is helping avert traffic accidents by assessing the risk of car crashes at specific intersections. MicroTraffic, a Canadian video analytics company, predicts the odds that accidents will occur at intersections that traditional methods overlook.
Letters
Last week, I asked what values the AI community stands for. Thank you to everyone who replied! The email responses in aggregate ran to 55 pages of text, and I enjoyed reading all of them.