AI & RoboticsNews

DeepMind’s big losses, and the questions around running an AI lab

December 28, 2020
Last week, on the heels of DeepMind’s breakthrough in using AI to predict protein-folding came the news that the UK-based AI company is still costing its parent company Alphabet Inc hundreds of millions of dollars in losses each year. A tech company losing money is nothing new. The tech industry is replete with examples of companies who burned investor money long before becoming profitable. But…
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AI & RoboticsNews

An AI reporter’s favorite books of 2020

December 24, 2020
The older I get, the more I wish I could stop time so I could read more books. Books that earn my time and attention are those that promise to enrich me as a person and deepen my understanding of AI for the work I do as senior AI staff writer at VentureBeat. This year, I read more than a dozen books, some published in recent months and others in years past, like The Curse of Bigness by Tim Wu, a…
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AI & RoboticsNews

Let this eerily accurate AI dunk on your Spotify habits

December 24, 2020
If you’re a Spotify user, you might have checked out your 2020 listening data with Spotify Wrapped. It’s a straightforward celebration of your year in music and podcasts, a judgement-free overview of what you listened to. The Pudding, however, is distorting that…
AI & RoboticsNews

DeepMind's latest AI can master games without being told their rules

December 24, 2020
In 2016, Alphabet’s DeepMind came out with AlphaGo, an AI which consistently beat the best human Go players. One year later, the subsidiary went on to refine its work, creating AlphaGo Zero. Where its predecessor learned to play Go by observing amateur and professional matches, AlphaGo Zero mastered the ancient game by simply playing against itself. DeepMind then created AlphaZero, which…
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AI & RoboticsNews

Researchers release Melinda dataset to train AI systems for analyzing study methods

December 23, 2020
Curating biological studies is an important yet labor-intensive process performed by researchers in life sciences fields. Among other tasks, curators must recognizing experiment methods, identifying the underlying protocols that net the figures published in research articles. In other words, “biocurators” need to take figures, captions, and more into their consideration and make decisions…
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