This week, Timnit Gebru, a leading AI researcher, was fired from her position on an AI ethics team at Google in what she claims was retaliation for sending an email to colleagues critical of the company’s managerial practices. Reportedly the flashpoint was a paper Gebru coauthored that questioned the wisdom of building large language models and examined who benefits from (and who’s…
AI ethics pioneer’s exit from Google involved research into risks and inequality in large language models
December 4, 2020
Following a dispute over several emails and a research paper on Wednesday, AI ethics pioneer and research scientist Timnit Gebru no longer works at Google. According to a draft copy obtained by VentureBeat, the research paper surrounding her exit questions the wisdom of…
At Labs Day, an online event showcasing innovations across Intel’s portfolio, the company unveiled ControlFlag, a machine programming system that can autonomously detect errors in code. Intel claims that even in its infancy, ControlFlag shows promise as a productivity tool…
Microsoft is using AI to accelerate pull requests — the feature that lets developers tell others about changes they’ve made to code — toward completion by reminding authors to engage with their overdue requests. That’s according to a new whitepaper published this week detailing Nudge, an end-to-end service that leverages models based on effort estimation to predict the completion time for…
Timnit Gebru, one of the best-known AI researchers today and co-lead of an AI ethics team at Google, no longer works at the company. She was featured in Google promotional material as recently as May. According to Gebru, she was fired Wednesday for sending an email to…
Google AI is now piloting Loon's internet-beaming balloons
December 3, 2020
Alphabet’s Loon has shifted to a different type of navigation system for its internet-beaming balloons. Rather than relying on algorithms designed by humans, the balloons are using an artificial intelligence system Loon developed with Google AI over the last few years.
A…
Although Apple’s latest A14 Bionic chip enabled the iPhone 12 family and iPad Air tablets to deliver impressive performance improvements, Qualcomm is making clear that the next generation of Android devices will rely heavily on advanced AI and computer vision processors to retake the performance lead. Teased yesterday at Qualcomm’s virtual Tech Summit, the Snapdragon 888 is getting a full…
Companies are collecting increasing amounts of data, a trend that is driving the development of better analytical tools and tougher security. Analysis and security are now converging as confidential computing prepares to deliver a critical boost to artificial…
Facebook in May launched the Hateful Memes Challenge, a $100,000 competition aimed at spurring researchers to develop systems that can identify memes intended to hurt people. The first phase of the one-year contest recently crossed the halfway mark with over 3,000 entries…
Nvidia AI researchers have introduced AI for generating talking heads for video conferences from a single 2D image capable of achieving a wide range of manipulation, from rotating and moving a person’s head to motion transfer and video reconstruction. The AI uses the first frame in a video as a 2D photo then uses an unsupervised learning method to gather 3D keypoints within a video. In addition…
