Tech & Society
Transformers Take Over: Transformers Applied to Vision, Language, Video, and More
In 2021, transformers were harnessed to discover drugs, recognize speech, and paint pictures — and much more.
Year in Review
Tech & Society
Multimodal AI Takes Off: Multimodal Models, such as CLIP and DALL·E, are taking over AI.
While models like GPT-3 and EfficientNet, which work on text and images respectively, are responsible for some of deep learning’s highest-profile successes, approaches that find relationships between text and images made impressive
Tech & Society
Governments Lay Down the Law: Governments around the world increasingly regulate AI.
Legislators worldwide wrote new laws — some proposed, some enacted — to rein in societal impacts of automation.What happened: Authorities at all levels ratcheted up regulatory pressure as
Tech & Society
Trillions of Parameters: Are AI models with trillions of parameters the new normal?
The trend toward ever-larger models crossed the threshold from immense to ginormous. Google kicked off 2021 with Switch Transformer, the first published work to exceed a trillion parameters, weighing in at 1.6 trillion.
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
Natural Language Processing Models Get Literate: Why 2019 was a breakthrough year for NLP
Earlier language models powered by Word2Vec and GloVe embeddings yielded confused chatbots, grammar tools with middle-school reading comprehension, and not-half-bad translations. The latest generation is so good, some people consider it dangerous.