While I admire Elon Musk's ability to launch big idea after big idea, I have to agree with Schmidt and Zuckerberg – his concerns about AI stink of moral panic. Yes, we need to have the difficult debates around misuse and fairness, but these debates will only be triggered by continuing to explore the possibilities,…

I remember years ago hearing someone describe Google's biggest rival not as another search engine, but Amazon – people "view Google as a tool to research products, while Amazon is the place they go to buy". While it seems likely that Google's Shopping Actions programme will drive business, I do not see how this will…

How do you ensure your technically interesting project is truly a force for good, not merely further entrenching existing biases, stereotypes, and social problems? This great set of rules, based on experiences working on AI solutions in low-income countries, can help, regardless of where you're working: 1. Ask who's not at the table – are…

I find it fascinating that there are companies out there large enough, and with specific enough use cases, to justify creating custom hardware to solve their problems. Facebook's recently confirmed that they're working on chips dedicated to analyzing live video, to allow them to respond more quickly to unacceptable or inappropriate content (such as suicide…

Further demonstrating that just having the technology isn't enough – you have to keep innovating to stay relevant – Stitch Fix first started using AI and machine learning back in 2011, and it's given them a significant "first mover advantage" – but the commoditisation of these capabilities means that the things they once held as…

While "replacing 300 CPU-only servers on deep learning training" is hardly a benchmark, 15,500 images per second on ResNet-50 is – just a couple of years ago, training throughput would be 1-2 orders of magnitude slower. Also of interest is the approach that Nvidia is taking here – a single compute "node" will be capable…

While not the first to develop a virtual world to provide suitable simulations to accelerate reinforcement learning, this world certainly seems to be one of the most complex. It'll be interesting to see how effective these simulations actually are in the real world; so far though, there are no robots complex enough to actually fully…

The ethical questions raised by Google's (small) contract with the US military to develop AI are difficult and controversial, but they have to be asked, and i'd much rather they're asked in a form open to public debate than behind closed doors. https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/30/17408446/google-ai-guidelines-weaponry-military-pentagon-maven-contract Where will Google draw the line on weaponized AI?

In further evidence of the "automation increases jobs" argument, Amazon has recently released footage showing how robots in their warehouses make it quicker and easier for "associates" (=people) to pick and pack your order. This increased productivity means that the warehouses with the most robots are the most profitable, and hence employ the most people.…

In further evidence of the way the reducing cost of technology is saving lives, USGS posted a video showing unmaned drones sent to map and monitor lava flows following the eruption of Kīlauea in Hawaii. Analysis of the drone footage picked up a previously unknown but fast moving flow heading towards an as-yet unevacuated residential…