AI & RoboticsNews

How the ‘big 5’ bolstered their AI through acquisitions in 2019

December 23, 2019
The AI talent grab is real. This year alone, Pinterest CTO Vanja Josifovski jumped ship to Airbnb, while Pinterest hired Walmart CTO Jeremy King to head up its engineering team. Moreover, all the big tech companies, including Google and Apple, have for some time been vacuuming up AI talent through acquisitions — a recent CB Insights report noted 635 AI acquisitions since 2010, topped by Apple…
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AI & RoboticsNews

MIT and IBM develop AI that recommends documents based on topic

December 20, 2019
Even the best text-parsing recommendation algorithms can be stymied by data sets of a certain size. In an effort to to deliver faster, better classification performance than the bulk of existing methods, a team at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab and MIT’s Geometric Data Processing Group devised a technique that combines popular AI tools including embeddings and optimal transport. They say that their…
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AI & RoboticsNews

AI Weekly: Machine learning’s role in climate change

December 20, 2019
Climate change is the most existential threat humanity faces today, and AI can solve problems in unprecedented ways. It only makes sense that we use the latter to work on the former. That was a significant sub-theme of NeurIPS 2019, highlighted in particular by the Tackling…
AI & RoboticsNews

Amazon’s AI creates synthesized singers

December 20, 2019
AI and machine learning algorithms are quite skilled at generating works of art — and highly realistic images of apartments, people, and pets to boot. But relatively few have been tuned to singing synthesis, or the task of cloning the voices of musicians. Researchers from…
AI & RoboticsNews

Honda will show off its in-car AI assistant at CES

December 19, 2019
At CES 2020, Honda says it will finally show off its long-promised in-car personal assistant. The automaker has been working on its own digital helper since 2018 when it announced a partnership with SoundHound. Aside from the usual claims of “unprecedented” speed and accuracy, the company doesn’t say too much about how the tool compares to AI like Google Assistant and Siri. It…
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AI & RoboticsNews

YouTube's series on AI with Robert Downey Jr. is finally available

December 18, 2019
If you’ve ever had a question about artificial intelligence or how it works, YouTube’s latest Originals series, The Age of A.I., tries to answer those questions. The new eight-part show, which is available to watch today after a lengthy wait, features Robert Downey Jr. as he attempts to demystify terms like machine learning and computer vision while showing off some of the latest…
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