One longstanding goal of AI research is to allow robots to meaningfully interact with real-world environments. In a recent paper, researchers at Stanford and Facebook took a step toward this by extracting information related to actions like pushing or pulling objects with movable parts and using it to train an AI model. For example, given a drawer, their model can predict that applying a pulling…
Equifax will pay $640 million for Kount’s AI-driven identity and fraud prevention tools
January 9, 2021
Equifax announced today that it would pay $640 million to acquire Kount, a company that uses artificial intelligence to drive its fraud prevention and digital identity services. In a press release, Equifax executives said the deal would allow the company to further expand…
AI Weekly: The future of tech policy after an attempted coup
January 9, 2021
On Wednesday, we witnessed a coup attempt fueled by racism, disinformation, and the President of the United States. Video of the U.S. Capitol breach shows that Trump supporters were permitted to violate multiple federal laws, desecrate the people’s house, undermine…
How does Panasonic stand out in a crowded TV market? By courting new PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X owners, apparently. The electronics giant has unveiled its 2021 flagship OLED TV, the JZ2000, and its centerpiece is an HCX Pro AI Processor that not only improves picture quality (more on that in a moment), but delivers a big boost to gaming performance.
The 4K set promises some of the “very…
Deep learning has come a long way since the days when it could only recognize handwritten characters on checks and envelopes. Today, deep neural networks have become a key component of many computer vision applications, from photo and video editors to medical software…
Floor plans are useful for visualizing spaces, planning routes, and communicating architectural designs. A robot entering a new building, for instance, can use a floor plan to quickly sense the overall layout. Creating floor plans typically requires a full walkthrough so 3D…
AI models from Microsoft and Google already surpass human performance on the SuperGLUE language benchmark
January 7, 2021
In late 2019, researchers affiliated with Facebook, New York University (NYU), the University of Washington, and DeepMind proposed SuperGLUE, a new benchmark for AI designed to summarize research progress on a diverse set of language tasks. Building on the GLUE benchmark, which had been introduced one year prior, SuperGLUE includes a set of more difficult language understanding challenges…
OpenAI debuts DALL-E for generating images from text
January 6, 2021
OpenAI today debuted two multimodal AI systems that combine computer vision and NLP, like DALL-E, a system that generates images from text. For example, the photo above for this story was generated from the text prompt “an illustration of a baby daikon radish in a tutu…
When car dealers sell new vehicles, customers can rely on manufacturer-provided 3D models that look exactly like the cars they’re about to purchase. But that isn’t the case for used cars, which commonly have dings and other issues that must be disclosed to prospective…
AI Weekly: The argument in favor of regulation in 2021
January 5, 2021
2020 was an eventful year, not least of which because of a pandemic that shows little sign of abating. The AI research community experienced its own tribulations, capped off by Google’s firing of ethicist Timnit Gebru and a spat over AI ethics and “cancel culture” involving retired University of Washington professor Pedro Domingos. Facebook chief AI scientist Yann LeCun quit (and rejoined)…
