Last Week in AI
Every week, my team at Invector Labs publishes a newsletter to track 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: The Composer in the Machine
Art has long been considered one of the areas that differentiate humans from artificial intelligence(AI) systems but will that remain true in the near future? Artistic manifestations such as paintings, music or writing are based on unique human cognitive abilities such as creativity or abstract thinking as well as areas such as human emotions which are more related to chemical reactions than to the simple wiring of neurons in the brain. Art is also a notable part of the legacy of every generation throughout history but as the world becomes more digitized, the opportunity to create new forms of arts via algorithms is becoming more real.
In recent years, we have seen AI agents make inroads in artistic tasks such as poetry writing, painting and even music. This week, a team of researchers from OpenAI showcased MuseNet, a deep neural network that is able to generate melodies using up to 10 instruments. MuseNet draws knowledge from composers like Chopin, Rachmaninov and, why not, Lady Gaga. The lesson to be learned here is that artistic forms can be used to train AI algorithms in the styles, or themes that inspire us all and, in the future, even create new forms of art.
Now let’s take a look at the core developments in AI research and technology this week:
AI Research
OpenAI unveiled MuseNet, a deep neural network that is able to generate 4-minute musical compositions based on different styles.
>Read more in this blog post from the OpenAI team
AI researchers from Google published a new paper challenging some of the assumptions of unsupervised representation learning.
>Read more in this blog post from Google AI
Microsoft Research published a fascinating paper about how to design better natural language processing models.
>Read more in this blog post from Microsoft Research
Cool AI Tech Releases
Microsoft announced plans to support MLFlow as part of the Azure Machine Learning stack.
>Read more in this article at ZDNet
The team from Brazilian fintech company Nubank introduces fklearn, a new machine learning library.
>Read more in this article from the Nubank data science team
AI in the Real World
A team of neuroscientists from University of California, San Francisco introduced a new device that can translate brain signals into coherent speech.
>Read more in this article from Nature
MIT’s Media Lab Director Joi Ito wrote a brilliant piece for Wired Magazine challenging the risks of AI and introducing the concept of extended intelligence.
>Read the entire Wired article here
The AI world lost a legend this week with the passing of Nils Nilsson, whose work pioneered many areas of AI such as robotics or online navigation.
