Last Week in AI

Every week, my team at Invector Labs publishes a newsletter that covers the most recent developments in AI research and technology. You can find this week’s issue below. You can sign up for it below. Please do so, our guys worked really hard on this:

From the Editor: What AlphaStar Means for AI

Earlier this year, artificial intelligence(AI) powerhouse DeepMind unveiled an earlier version of AlphaStar, a reinforcement learning agent that could challenge the top world players in StarCraft II. This week, DeepMind published an update showing that AlphaStar can now play the full game at a Grandmaster level under professionally approved conditions. Specifically, AlphaStar was able to raise to at Grandmaster level in all StarCraft modalities overperforming 99.8% of human players.

Even though AlphaStar is focused on a gaming scenario, the development can have profound implication for general-purpose AI solutions. StarCraft is a strategy game in which agents need to collaborate, cooperate, explore new environment and make decisions in the absence of complete information. From self-driving vehicles to economic planning, the principles behind AlphaStar can become foundational to a new generation of AI applications.

Now let’s take a look at the core developments in AI research and technology this week: