AI & Robotics

Might AI help improve customer service for the millions of people who shop on Amazon.com? Amazon intends to find out. In a blog post, the Seattle tech giant revealed that it’s testing two AI-based systems to handle incoming shopper inquiries. One fields requests from customers automatically and without human intervention, while the other helps human service agents respond more quickly and…

Vimeo has officially launched its new short-form social video editing platform, a month after first introducing the tool in beta. Vimeo Create, as the new service is called, represents the first fruits of Vimeo’s reported $200 million Magisto acquisition last year. Magisto, for the uninitiated, is a Qualcomm-backed AI-powered video editing app that analyzes images, speech, and audio to create a…

L1ght, a fledgling AI startup that wants to help technology companies combat online toxicity, bullying, and abuse, has raised $15 million in a seed round of funding from Mangrove Capital Partners, Tribeca Venture Partners, and Western Technology Investment. The company’s substantial seed funding comes as tech companies are struggling to contain offensive and harmful behavior on their platforms.

Defenses against adversarial attacks, which in the context of AI refer to techniques that fool models through malicious input, are increasingly being broken by “defense-aware” attacks. In fact, most state-of-the-art methods claiming to detect adversarial attacks have been counteracted shortly after their publication. To break the cycle, researchers at the University of California, San Diego…