There’s booming demand for silicon custom-designed to accelerate AI workloads, as the gobs of cash raised by startups like Hailo Technologies, Graphcore, and Untether AI demonstrates. The fierce competition isn’t deterring Blaize (formerly Thinci), which hopes to stand out from the crowd with a novel graph streaming architecture. The nine-year-old startup’s claimed system-on-chip performance…
AI designed this gin, but would you drink it?
November 11, 2019
Two years ago, I owned a bar with over 300 different gins — one of the largest collections of juniper-flavored spirits at any establishment in the United States. None of those gins was designed by a computer, a fact that my bartenders would likely have explained was for…
My name is John.
My name is John Connor, and I live at 19,828 Almond Avenue, Los Angeles.
My name is John Connor, I live at 19,828 Almond Avenue, Los Angeles, and my California police record J-66455705 lists my supposedly expunged juvenile convictions for vandalism…
AI-generated fake content could unleash a virtual arms race
November 11, 2019
When it comes to AI’s role in making online content, Kristin Tynski, VP of digital marketing firm Fractl, sees an opportunity to boost creativity. But a recent experiment in AI-generated content left her a bit shaken. Using publicly available AI tools and about an hour of her time, Tynski created a website that includes 30 highly polished blog posts, as well as an AI-generated headshot for the…
Richard Bartle interview: How game developers should think about sapient AI characters
November 11, 2019
Richard Bartle is one of the leading academics on video games and is a senior lecturer and honorary professor of computer game design at the University of Essex in the United Kingdom. He might seem an unusual choice to talk about the ethics of artificial intelligence, but…
AI ethics is all about power
November 11, 2019
At The Common Good in the Digital Age, a tech conference held in Vatican City recently, Pope Francis urged Facebook executives, venture capitalists, and government regulators to be wary of the impact of AI and other technologies. “If mankind’s so-called technological…
When AI is a tool and when it’s a weapon
November 11, 2019
The immense capabilities artificial intelligence is bringing to the world would have been inconceivable to past generations. But even as we marvel at the incredible power these new technologies afford, we’re faced with complex and urgent questions about the balance of benefit and harm.
When most people ponder whether AI is good or evil, what they’re essentially trying to grasp is whether AI is…
From black box to white box: Reclaiming human power in AI
November 11, 2019
Presented by Dataiku
It’s hard to imagine what life was like before the peak of AI hype in which we currently find ourselves. But it was just a few years ago, in 2012, that Apple gave the world the first integrated version of Siri on the iPhone 4S, which people used to…
The pitfalls of a ‘retrofit human’ in AI systems
November 11, 2019
Stanislav Petrov is not a famous name in the computer science space, like Ada Lovelace or Grace Hopper, but his story serves as a critical lesson for developers of AI systems. Petrov, who passed away on May 19, 2017, was a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Union’s Air…
AI in patent law: Enabler or hindrance?
November 11, 2019
Filing a patent is the clerical equivalent of pulling teeth — at least in the U.S. It first requires inventors to determine the type of intellectual property (IP) protection they require (i.e., utility, design, or plant). Then they’re on the hook to conduct a United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) database search for similar inventions. If and only if the novelty of their idea…
