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
Artificial intelligence(AI) news this week were dominated by the launch of the American AI Initiative. Made official by an executive order signed by US President Donald Trump, the American AI initiative will direct federal funding towards AI research and developments. The official White House communique outlined five fundamental areas for the the American AI Initiative:
- Research and development. Federal agencies will be asked to “prioritize AI investments” in their R&D budgets, and report how this money is spent to create a more comprehensive overview of government investment in artificial intelligence.
- Freeing resources. Federal data, algorithms, and processing power will be made available to researchers, providing a boost in areas like transportation and health care.
- Ethical standards. Government bodies like the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will be asked to create standards that will guide the development of “reliable, robust, trustworthy, secure, portable, and interoperable AI systems.”
- Automation. Agencies will be asked to prepare workers for changes to the job market caused by new technology with the creation of fellowships and apprenticeships.
- International outreach. The administration wants to work with other countries on AI development, but do so in a way that retains American “values and interests.”
The American AI Initiatives is the latest examples of big governments making AI a key part of their agendas. Canada and China are examples of governments that have been very active promoting AI research and development. Certainly, The United States has the opportunity to take these initiatives to a whole new level. From the socio-economic standpoint, the race towards AI dominance is becoming a two-country contest between the US and China and can widen the economic gap the rest of developed and emerging economies even more. The influence of governments in the development of AI is going to be one of the interesting trends to follow in the next few years.
Now let’s take a look at the core developments in AI research and technology this week:
Research
Microsoft AI Researchers published a paper that proposes a method to identify potential biases in textual datasets.
>Read more in this blog post from Microsoft Research
OpenAI published a new paper proposing an unsupervised model that can master different natural language understanding tasks such as question-answering or text generation.
>Read more in this blog post from OpenAI
Microsoft Research announced that it was working on extreme multiple choice problems that can have millions of potential answers.
>Read more in this blog post from Microsoft Research
Cool Tech Releases
Google and DeepMind researchers released PlaNet, a reinforcement learning agent that learns about the environment using images and leverages its knowledge for long-term planning.
>Read more in this blog post from Google Research
Uber open sourced Ludwig, a no-code toolbox for training and creating deep learning models.
>Read more in this blog post from Uber engineering
Facebook AI Research (FAIR) open sourced new datasets, tools and a research paper about its ELF OpenGo game.
>Read more in this blog post from the FAIR team
AI in the Real World
President Donald Trump announced a new initiative to foment the AI research and development.
>Read more in the official White House communique
Pope Francis met with Microsoft President Brad Smith to discuss the ways AI can bridge the gap between poor and rich nations.
>Read more in this coverage from Reuters
Harvard biologists accept that AI is superior than humans at developing new drugs.
