Mini-Briefs

To Compete With Google, OpenAI Seeks Investors–and Profits

OpenAI LP raised $1B from Microsoft. OpenAI, the non-profit (which is different, from OpenAI LP, the company used to raise the funds), was initially founded to ensure that development of AI technologies did not take place only in large tech companies.

OpenAI LP was established in such a way that it has a fiduciary responsibility to uphold the nonprofit’s charter, which pledges to “use any influence we obtain over AGI’s deployment to ensure it is used for the benefit of all.”

Holders of stakes in OpenAI LP will be limited to a return of 100 times what they put in, with any excess going back to the nonprofit OpenAI to sustain its mission.

Recent developments at OpenAI have led many within the field to question the organization is hoping to achieve.

What is OpenAI? I don't know anymore.
A non-profit that leveraged good will whilst silently giving out equity for years prepping a shift to for-profit that is now seeking to license closed tech through a third party by segmenting tech under a banner of pre/post "AGI" technology? https://t.co/X6JIIuvcAd

— Smerity (@Smerity) July 22, 2019

The Amazing Ways Dubai Airport Uses Artificial Intelligence

A nice roundup of the different ways AI technologies are used in one of the busiest airports in the world. The article enumerates the various ways AI tech can be applied in airports today.

The Emirates Ministry of the Interior said that by 2020, immigration officers would no longer be needed in the UAE. They will be replaced by artificial intelligence.

Advances & Business

• Bar Trek: AI Startup Launches Smoothie-Making Robots - Startup Blendid is trekking into the future with smoothie-making robots. The Silicon Valley robotics company is using AI powered by the compact supercomputing of  NVIDIA Jetson to quickly serve up customizable juice and vegetable blends.

• GM Cruise to delay commercial deployment of self-driving cars beyond 2019 - General Motors Co’s self-driving unit, Cruise, said on Wednesday it was delaying the commercial deployment of cars past its target of 2019 as more testing of the vehicles was required.

• This AI-powered autocompletion software is Gmail’s Smart Compose for coders - Over the past year, AI has seriously improved its ability to generate the written word. By scanning huge datasets of text, machine learning software can produce convincing samples of everything from short stories to song lyrics.

• DeepMind is helping Waymo evolve better self-driving AI algorithms - Waymo’s self-driving cars now have something in common with the brains that guide regular vehicles: their intelligence comes partly from the power of evolution.

Analysis & Policy

• AI ‘emotion recognition’ can’t be trusted - As artificial intelligence is used to make more decisions about our lives, engineers have sought out ways to make it more emotionally intelligent. That means automating some of the emotional tasks that come naturally to humans — most notably, looking at a person’s face and knowing how they feel.

• Humans, robot teams work better when there’s an emotional connection - Soldiers develop attachments to the robots that help them diffuse bombs in the field. Despite numerous warnings about privacy, millions of us trust smart speakers like Alexa to listen into our daily lives.

Expert Opinions & Discussion within the field

• Dr. Fei-Fei Li: The benevolent scientist - Fei-Fei Li, the internationally-celebrated scientist, has always been a champion of the positive power of artificial intelligence (A.I.).

• Has BERT Been Cheating? Researchers Say it Exploits ‘Spurious Statistical Cues’ - Since Google Research introduced its Bidirectional Transformer (BERT) in 2018 the model has gained unprecedented popularity among researchers.

• Save The Artificial Intelligence Party For When It’s Actually Intelligent - Former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and Cornell University professor Daniel Huttenlocher worked together for three years to write a single article for the August 2019 issue of The Atlantic.

Explainers

• Our Vision for the Future of Synthetic Media - In recent years ‘synthetic media’ has emerged as a catch-all term used to describe video, image, text and voice that has been fully or partially generated by computers.

• Researchers are using Darwin’s theories to evolve AI, so only the strongest algorithms survive - Modern artificial intelligence is built to mimic nature—the field’s main pursuit is replicating in a computer the same decision-making prowess that humankind creates biologically.

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