Mini Briefs

DeepMind’s Losses and the Future of Artificial Intelligence

It’s not fresh news that Deepmind had an expensive 2018. Gary Marcus, in an Opinion piece for the Wired, looks at what it means, for Deepmind and AI in general.

He looks at three central questions:

Is DeepMind on the right track scientifically? Are investments of this magnitude sound from Alphabet’s perspective? And how will the losses affect AI in general?

It’s 2043. We Need a New American Dream for the A.I. Revolution.

The NY times is running an Op-Eds from the future series. This week, they had Baobao Zhang from the University of Oxford pen an Op-Ed from the 2040s about how AI has changed the American dream and what policy changes can be made to renew the American dream.

The A.I. Revolution should be an age of plenty for all, not a Gilded Age with no end in sight.

Advances & Business

• UPS Has Been Delivering Cargo in Self-Driving Trucks for Months And No One Knew - The self-driving freight truck startup TuSimple has been carrying mail across the state of Arizona for several weeks. UPS announced on Thursday that its venture capital arm has made a minority investment in TuSimple.

• Traces AI is building a less invasive alternative to facial recognition tracking - Traces AI is a new computer vision startup, in Y Combinator’s latest batch of bets, that’s focused on helping cameras track people without relying on facial recognition data, something the founders believe is too invasive of the public’s privacy.

• Having mastered Space Invaders, chess, and Go, AI tackles video soccer - Not content to sit on its laurels, Google Deepmind is now turning its attention to more open-ended games where unpredictability plays a more important role. And its next target is video soccer.

• Nvidia just made it easier to build smarter chatbots and slicker fake news - Chip maker Nvidia is betting that AI’s language skills will advance rapidly—it’s releasing a powerful tool for putting together chatty programs.

• It’s official – Google AI gives you cancer …diagnosis in real time: Neural net can spot breast, prostate tumors - Google Health’s so-called augmented-reality microscope has proven surprisingly accurate at detecting and diagnosing cancerous tumors in real time.

• Inside Voyage’s plan to deliver a driverless future - In two years, Voyage has gone from a tiny self-driving car upstart spun out of Udacity to a company able to operate on 200 miles of roads in retirement communities.

Concerns & Hype

• Social care robots privatise loneliness, and erode the pleasure of being truly known - If society continues devaluing social care, we may depend on automated smiles to break the isolation of the chronically lonely.

• The Democratic Party deepfaked its own chairman to highlight 2020 concerns - The Democratic National Committee wanted to demonstrate the potential threat to the 2020 election posed by deepfake videos — clips created with artificial intelligence that can make people appear to do or say things they never did.

• Google’s Artificial Intelligence Hate Speech Detector Is ‘Racially Biased,’ Study Finds - Google created an artificial intelligence algorithm in 2016 meant to monitor and prevent hate speech on social media platforms and websites. However, the machine learning tool may be having the opposite outcome as it seems to be biased against black people.

• This AI startup claims to automate app making but actually just uses humans - Engineer.ai, an Indian startup claiming to have built an artificial intelligence-assisted app development platform, is not in fact using AI to literally build apps, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.

• Facebook’s human-AI blend for audio transcription is now facing privacy scrutiny in Europe - Facebook’s lead privacy regulator in Europe is now asking the company for detailed information about the operation of a voice-to-text feature in Facebook’s Messenger app and how it complies with EU law.

• A new clothing line confuses automated license plate readers - Garments from Adversarial Fashion feed junk data into surveillance cameras, in an effort to make their databases less effective.

Analysis & Policy

• Artificial intelligence can contribute to a safer world - It is time to look past traditional defense technologies and see if newer approaches can tilt the pendulum back in the defender’s favor. Artificial Intelligence (AI) can play a critical role here, helping to identify, classify and promulgate counteractions on potential threats faster than any security personnel.

• I’m a writer who went to work at an Amazon warehouse, a call center, and a McDonald’s. I saw firsthand how low-wage work is driving America over the edge.

• AG Yost suspends access to facial-recognition database - Attorney General Dave Yost suspended access to Ohio’s facial-recognition databases for 4,500 law enforcement officers following a national report that revealed federal agencies are mining state databases without people’s consent.

• Artificial intelligence is no silver bullet for governance

• A.I. Is Learning From Humans. Many Humans. - Artificial intelligence is being taught by thousands of office workers around the world. It is not exactly futuristic work.

Expert Opinions & Discussion within the field

• Robots need a new philosophy to get a grip - Robots need to know the reason why they are doing a job if they are to effectively and safely work alongside people in the near future. In simple terms, this means machines need to understand motive the way humans do, and not just perform tasks blindly, without context.

• Stop asking AI researchers to build products, please.

• Frameworks for estimating large-scale Autonomous Vehicle deployments - A set of frameworks aimed to help answer the question: “When will I be able to call an AV to pick me up from wherever I am and drive me wherever I want to go?”

• NLP’s Clever Hans Moment has Arrived - A recent paper present quite an egregious case of a neural network, specifically a NLP model called BERT, not learning what we think it learns.

Explainers

• Is Elon Wrong About LiDAR? - Elon Musk recently made headlines when he took a high-profile swipe at LiDAR technology, predicting that “anyone relying on LiDAR is doomed”. Scale has a suite of data labeling products built for AV developers, which they used to put the two self-driving philosophies to the test.

• How Do Algorithms Become Biased? - What can a mistake in a computer program from 1843 tell us about modern-day biases in software algorithms?

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