Last year, we got to see coherent, multi-paragraph text generated by OpenAI’s GPT-2 model. This week, a new paper from Google AI showed that a chatbot based on a gigantic neural network and huge amounts of data can hold coherent conversations, maintaining context over multiple turns and conversing on just about any topic. The chatbot is called Meena, and it’s even able to invent jokes (see…
AI Weekly: AI joins the fight against diseases like coronavirus
January 31, 2020
In light of the rising death toll from the coronavirus, which this week spread to the U.S. and was declared a health emergency by the World Health Organization (WHO), it’s worth looking at AI’s role in curbing the spread of other diseases. Algorithms have not only…
All of our fears around facial recognition technology are coming true thanks to a little known startup called ClearView AI. This week, Devindra and Cherlynn dive into how ClearView works, and what unchecked access to powerful facial recognition means for the future of…
Can AI capture the essence of reasoning — that is, the appreciation of distant relationships among elements distributed across multiple facts or memories? Alphabet subsidiary DeepMind sought to find out in a study published on the preprint server Arxiv.org, which proposes an architecture — MEMO — with the capacity to reason over long distances. They say that its two novel components — the…
PETA wants to replace Punxsutawney Phil with an animatronic AI
January 30, 2020
When we imagine the future of artificial intelligence, we tend to think of the technology making most human jobs obsolete. But if PETA has its way, an AI could also take over for the world’s most famous groundhog, Punxsutawney Phil. In a letter signed by PETA founder and…
In what might only be perceived as a win for Facebook, OpenAI today announced that it will migrate to the social network’s PyTorch machine learning framework in future projects, eschewing Google’s long-in-the-tooth TensorFlow platform. OpenAI is the San Francisco-based…
Amazon details AI that answers questions more reliably
January 30, 2020
Might natural language models improve in their ability to answer questions on the fly? That’s what a team of Amazon researchers set out to answer in a study scheduled to be presented at the 2020 Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in New York. They posit a method for adapting models based on Google’s Transformer architecture — which is particularly good at learning…
Researchers associated with Google and the Partnership on AI have created a framework to help companies and their engineering teams audit AI systems before deploying them.
The framework, intended to add a layer of quality assurance to businesses launching AI, translates into…
IBM releases annotation tool that taps AI to label images
January 30, 2020
Data labeling is an arduous — but necessary — part of the AI model training process. Currently, it takes around 200-500 samples of annotated images for a model to learn to detect a single object. Fortunately, freely available tools help automate the most monotonous…
Aquant raises $30 million for AI that gives customer service agents mission-critical data
January 30, 2020
Organizational data is often scattered across systems, hidden within text, and locked within the minds of employees. Given the disparate channels, how might this data be unified and delivered to support agents engaged in service calls? Assaf Melochna and Shahar Chen, former colleagues at workforce management and service optimization company ClickSoftware, advocate an AI- and machine learning-based…
