OpenAI or ClosedAI? That Is A Question.
Synced Global AI Weekly February 24th
Category: AI
Global machine intelligence updates.
Steady Growth and Integration Push Amazon Alexa to the Top
According to a CIRP study, Amazon Alexa has a commanding 70 percent market share in the US, with rival Google Assistant taking 24 percent. A Market Research Future study predicts the voice assistant market will reach US$7.8 billion by 2023, a compound annual growth rate of almost 40 percent.
Yann LeCun Cake Analogy 2.0
Facebook AI Chief Yann LeCun introduced his now-famous “cake analogy” at NIPS 2016: “If intelligence is a cake, the bulk of the cake is unsupervised learning, the icing on the cake is supervised learning, and the cherry on the cake is reinforcement learning (RL).”
Oxford University AI Policy Researcher Says Trump’s AI Initiative Falls Short on Immigration and Ethics Issues
Last Monday US President Donald Trump signed the “American AI Initiative,” an executive order designed to spur US investment in artificial intelligence and boost the domestic AI industry. The initiative has five highlights: Investing in AI Research and Development (R&D), Unleashing AI Resources, Setting AI Governance Standards, Building the AI Workforce, International Engagement and Protecting our AI Advantage.
NAS-Generated Model Achieves SOTA In Super-Resolution
In its new paper Fast, Accurate and Lightweight Super-Resolution with Neural Architecture Search, Xiaomi’s research team introduces a deep convolution neural network (CNN) model using a neural architecture search (NAS) approach. Performance is comparable to cutting-edge models such as CARN and CARN-M.
PyTorch Reimplementation of OpenAI GPT-2 Small Model Released
Github developer Hugging Face has updated its repository with a PyTorch reimplementation of the GPT-2 language model small version that OpenAI open-sourced last week, along with pretrained models and fine-tuning examples.
Facebook Open-Sources Improved Go Bot and Huge Game Library
Facebook AI Research (FAIR) introduced their own Go bot last year, aiming to reproduce AlphaGo Zero results using their Extensible, Lightweight Framework (ELF) for reinforcement learning research. FAIR recently added new features to ELF OpenGo and has open-sourced the project.
AI Biweekly: Trending StyleGAN Raises Concerns; AI Applications in the Finance Industry
10 AI News You Must Know from February W 1 – W 2
Huge New NSFW Dataset for Content Filtering
There are some things that some people just don’t want showing up on their websites, and this has spawned a wide range of activities and technologies that fall under “content review.”
Huge Investment In Self-Driving Companies: These Startups Are Noteworthy
Synced Global AI Weekly February 17th
Yoshua Bengio On AI Priors and Challenges
Synced spoke with AI pioneer Professor Yoshua Bengio at the Computing in the 21st Century Conference in Beijing, where he discussed his recent research and the current state of AI.
Microsoft’s New MT-DNN Outperforms Google BERT
Microsoft researchers have released technical details of an AI system that combines both approaches. The new Multi-Task Deep Neural Network (MT-DNN) is a natural language processing (NLP) model that outperforms Google BERT in nine of eleven benchmark NLP tasks.
AI Hasn’t Found Its Isaac Newton: Gary Marcus on Deep Learning Defects & ‘Frenemy’ Yann LeCun
Synced is proud to present Gary Marcus as the last installment in our Lunar New Year Project — a series of interviews with AI experts reflecting on AI development in 2018 and looking ahead to 2019. (Read the previous articles on Clarifai CEO Matt Zeiler and Google Brain Researcher Quoc Le.)
Federated Learning: The Future of Distributed Machine Learning
In 2017 Google introduced Federated Learning (FL), “a specific category of distributed machine learning approaches which trains machine learning models using decentralized data residing on end devices such as mobile phones.” A new Google paper has now proposed a scalable production system for federated learning to enable increasing workload and output through the addition of resources such as compute, storage, bandwidth, etc.
OpenAI Guards Its ML Model Code & Data to Thwart Malicious Usage
The San Francisco-based AI non-profit however has raised eyebrows in the research community with its unusual decision to not release the language model’s code and training dataset. In a statement sent to Synced, OpenAI explained the choice was made to prevent malicious use: “it’s clear that the ability to generate synthetic text that is conditioned on specific subjects has the potential for significant abuse.”
Uber’s Code-Free Ludwig: Deep Learning for Dummies?
Uber has unveiled Ludwig, a new TensorFlow-based toolkit that enables users to train and test deep learning models without writing any code. The toolkit will help non-experts understand models and accelerate their iterative development by simplifying the prototyping process and data processing.
DeepFashion2: A Versatile Benchmark for Fashion Image Understanding
CUHK researchers recently teamed up with Chinese AI giant SenseTime to develop a greatly improved iteration in DeepFashion2, a large-scale benchmark with comprehensive tasks and annotations of fashion image understanding.
IBM AI Debater Vs Human Champ
Debating is a hallmark of human civilization, and few do it better than World Debating Championship Finalist Harish Natarajan. Last night at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Natarajan stepped up against an AI-empowered debating machine from IBM.
Lunar New Year, AI Style
Welcome to the Year of the Pig! Lunar New Year is China’s biggest holiday, with this year’s celebrations picking up during the “Little Year” period in late January, peaking February 4 for New Year’s Eve, and continuing through February 19.
Exciting Papers and Projects from Google
Synced Global AI Weekly February 10th
NVIDIA Open-Sources Hyper-Realistic Face Generator StyleGAN
In December Synced reported on a hyperrealistic face generator developed by US chip giant NVIDIA. The GAN-based model performs so well that most people can’t distinguish the faces it generates from real photos. This week NVIDIA announced that it is open-sourcing the nifty tool, which it has dubbed “StyleGAN”.
Google Brain Research Scientist Quoc Le on AutoML and More
The Synced Lunar New Year Project is a series of interviews with AI experts reflecting on AI development in 2018 and looking ahead to 2019. In this second installment (click here to read the previous article on Clarifai CEO Matt Zeiler), Synced speaks with Google Brain Researcher Quoc Le on his latest invention, AutoML, Google Brain’s pursuit of AI, and the secret of transforming lab technologies into real practices.
Google’s Lunar New Year AI Surprises
Google rang in the Lunar New Year with a couple of AI-powered treats: a new Live Transcribe service to help the deaf and hard of hearing, and a Google Doodle showcasing the ancient Chinese art of Shadow Puppetry.
Uber AI’s Go-Explore Tackles Hard-Exploration Problems
Uber AI Lab has created a buzz in the machine learning community with the publication of a paper introducing a new reinforcement learning algorithm called Go-Explore. The algorithm is designed to overcome the challenges of intelligence exploration in reinforcement learning to improve performance on hard-exploration tasks.
On Compilers: First TVM and Deep Learning Conference
Last December some 9,000 attendees packed a single venue in Montreal for a week-long academic conference. NeurIPS was completely sold out, the latest indication of just how hot AI is nowadays. As AI and machine learning continue to ignite discussion across a wide variety of disciplines, novel approaches to the tech are also garnering interest.
Landing AI Names Gopi Prashanth New VP of Engineering
AI Guru Andrew Ng announced today that Gopi Prashanth, formerly the Director of Technology for Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence at Amazon Go, is joining Landing AI as VP of Engineering.
David vs Goliath: Clarifai CEO Matt Zeiler Takes On the Tech Giants
This is the first installment of the Synced Lunar New Year Project, a series of interviews with AI experts reflecting on AI development in 2018 and looking ahead to 2019. In this article, Synced chats with Clarifai Founder and CEO Matt Zeiler on recent progress in computer vision and his company’s plans for the future. Founded in New York in 2013, Clarifai produces advanced image recognition systems.
Papers With Code Adds State-of-the-Art Features
Papers With Code is a unique and useful resource that presents trending ML research along with the code to implement it. The site was created by Atlas ML CEO Robert Stojnic, aka “rstoj” on Reddit’s machine learning board. The latest version of Papers With Code has added 950+ unique machine learning tasks, 500+ State-of-the-Art result leaderboards and 8500+ papers with code.
AI Biweekly: Voice Assistants Take New Roles; AI Reduces Medical Overtreatment
10 AI News You Must Know From January W4 – W5
Shannon.AI’s Glyce Masters 13 Chinese NLP Tasks
Researchers from NLP startup Shannon.AI have published a study proposing Glyce — a set of Chinese glyph-vectors for Chinese character representations. Glyce has already mastered 13 core Chinese natural language processing tasks.
NLP Big Week: Stanford Released Python NLP Library; NLP Papers from DeepMind and Facebook
Synced Global AI Weekly February 3rd
AI Is Personalizing Hotel Services
Synced surveyed several “future hotels” that are already applying AI in hospitality, to see how the tech can provide guests with a unique and satisfying experience.
AI-Powered & FDA-Approved Medical Health Projects
In July 2017 the US FDA (Food and Drug Administration) launched its Digital Health Innovation Action Plan to provide Americans “timely access to safe and effective digital health products,” many of which are being developed using artificial intelligence technologies.
AI Gaming Gets Physical: MIT Robot Plays Jenga!
There’s a lot more to a friendly game of Jenga than meets the eye. Strategies are informed by a complex set of tactile and visual stimuli — by touching a block and observing the tower, we not only see but also feel our actions and their consequences. The MIT Jenga robot thus marks an important step in AI’s transition to the physical world.
AI Loves Open-Sourced Data: What’s New in January
To help keep our readers abreast of the trend, Synced has identified five high-quality open-source datasets that were released this month (January 2019) and that AI researchers and engineers might find useful in their work.
Facebook BISON: An Alternative Evaluation Task for Visual-Grounding Systems
A cooperative research group from Facebook and the University of Southern California has introduced an alternative evaluation task for visual-grounding systems: BISON (Binary Image Selection).
Tsinghua University Proves Quantum Supremacy on GANs
Many scientists believe that a quantum computing device will one day perform highly complex computational tasks which are far beyond the ability of today’s classical computers.
AAAI-19 Announces Best Papers
The 33rd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-19) is now underway in Hawaii, USA. The program chairs are Pascal Van Hentenryck (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA) and Zhi-Hua Zhou (Nanjing University, China).
California Startup GTI Releases AI Chips to Challenge NVIDIA and Intel
In his 1988 IEEE paper Cellular Neural Networks: Theory, UC Berkeley PhD student Lin Yang proposed Cellular Neural Network theory, a predecessor of the Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) that would later revolutionize machine learning. Based on this theory, Yang blueprinted a 20*20 parallel simulated circuit chip in the university lab.
Week of Open Source: Google AI, Facebook and Stanford
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