Last Week in AI

Our 89th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
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Outline:
(00:00) Intro
Applications & Business
(3:23) Amazon Uses Machine Learning to Improve Video Quality on Prime Video
(6:55) These Campaigns Hope 'Deepfake' Candidates Help Get Out the Vote
Research & Advancements
(16:25) DeepMind’s new AI model helps decipher, date, and locate ancient inscriptions
(20:45) Generating and Identifying Propaganda With Machine Learning
Society & Ethics
(27:08) The secret police: Cops built a shadowy surveillance machine in Minnesota after George Floyd's murder
(33:40) AI-produced images can't fix diversity issues in dermatology databases
Fun & Neat
(40:35) Grunt of the litter: scientists use AI to decode pig calls
(43:25) I fell in love with my AI girlfriend - and it saved my marriage'
(48:00) Outro

Our 88th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
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Outline:
(00:00) Intro
Applications & Business
(01:18) How GitHub Uses Machine Learning to Extend Vulnerability Code Scanning
(06:55) First Wholly AI-Developed Drug Enters Phase 1 Trials
Research & Advancements
(10:50) Stanford University use AI computing to cut DNA sequencing down to five hours
(15:36) AI Machines Have Beaten Moore's Law Over The Last Decade, Say Computer Scientists
Society & Ethics
(21:56) China Is About to Regulate AI—and the World Is Watching
(28:00) Russia’s AI Army: Drones, AI-Guided Missiles and Autonomous Tanks
Fun & Neat
(36:20) How vacation photos of zebras and whales can help conservation
(40:50) Walmart’s Choose My Model Helps Shoppers Try on Clothes Virtually
(43:37) Baidu plans 100-city robot taxi rollout by 2030 
(46:01) Outro

Our 87th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
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Outline:
(00:00) Intro
(01:30) AI Arrives for Serious Photo Editing, Not Just Smartphone Snapshots
(05:20) Listen to an AI voice actor try and flirt with you
(10:28) DeepMind’s AI can control superheated plasma inside a fusion reactor
(15:55) Good News About the Carbon Footprint of Machine Learning Training
(21:36) Who Is Behind QAnon? Linguistic Detectives Find Fingerprints
(26:18) Facial recognition firm Clearview AI tells investors it is seeking massive expansion beyond law enforcement
(31:23) This AI Generates Fake New Pokémon, And It's Actually Pretty Good
(34:01) AI generated this moody, entertaining animated music video
(37:35) Outro

Our 86th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
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Outline:
(00:00) Intro
(01:22) This AI is set to help stop illegal fishing
(04:21) An ancient language has defied translation for 100 years. Can AI crack the code?
(09:40) The New CGI: Creating Neural Neighborhoods With Block-NeRF
(12:45) MuZero’s first step from research into the real world
(16:40) MoviePass 2.0 Wants to Track Your Eyeballs to Make Sure You Watch Ads
(20:02) AI fails its job interview
(23:58) Mad Scientist Forces AI to Make Horrific Pictures Out of BuzzFeed Headlines
(26:18) Artist uses AI to perfectly fake 70s science fiction pulp covers – artwork and titles

Our 85th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
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Outline:
(00:00) Intro
(01:20) Machine learning the hard way: IBM Watson's fatal misdiagnosis
(05:20) How homeowners defeated Zillow’s AI, which led to Zillow Offers’ demise
(09:00) DeepMind claims its new code-generating system is competitive with human programmers
(14:00) Announcing GPT-NeoX-20B
(16:35) AI Insurance Company Faces Class Action for Use of Biometric Data
(19:24) Democratic lawmakers take another stab at AI bias legislation
(22:55) AI-generated Valentine's Cards
(26:10) Tell this AI your story's themes, and it'll write the first paragraph for you
(28:50) Outro

Our 84rd episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Note: apologies for issues with sound quality in this episode!
Outline:
Applications & BusinessMeta Aims to Build the World's Fastest AI Supercomputer
Deploying machine learning to improve mental health
Research & Advancements
OpenAI rolls out new text-generating models that it claims are less toxic
Meta researchers build an AI that learns equally well from visual, written or spoken materials
Society & Ethics
China Proposes Increased Regulation of Deepfakes and Other AI Synthesis Systems
IRS Will Require Facial Recognition Scans to Access Your Taxes
Fun & Neat
Google AI tools bring back women in science to the fore
Watch an AI Play the Best Game of Tetris You've Ever Seen 
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Our 83rd episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Outline:
(00:00) Intro
(01:10) This AI Software Nearly Predicted Omicron’s Tricky Structure 
(02:48) BioNTech and London A.I. company create "early warning system" for COVID-19 variants
(05:20) We’re one step closer to self-farming farms
(09:55) ‘We Were Blown Away’: How New A.I. Research Is Changing the Way Conservators and Collectors Think About Attribution
(12:42) Meta claims its AI improves speech recognition quality by reading lips
(15:46) The Messy History of Facial Recognition Company Clearview AI
(18:30) Feds' spending on facial recognition tech expands, despite privacy concerns
(20:35) Great Resignation Versus Increasing Investment In AI, Robotics And Automation: A Troubling Trend
(25:55) Github Copilot Wants to Play Chess Instead of Code
(28:22) AIML machine learning students develop beer using AI
(31:40) Robo-dogs and therapy bots: Artificial intelligence goes cuddly
(34:55) Outro
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Feel free to email us your thoughts or feedback at contact@lastweekin.ai

For our first episode in 2022, we are joined with our friends from the Towards Data Science podcast to discuss our thoughts about the AI-related trends and events that happened in 2021.
Some things we discuss are:
Foundation models continue to grow, but one interesting trend is the focus on efficiency along with (instead of?) scale. For example, while DeepMind’s Gopher model has fewer than twice the parameters of GPT-3, it’s reportedly 25 times more efficient, meaning that much more value is being squeezed out of the same training data and compute. AI21Labs’ Jurrassic models are also equal to GPT-3 on a parameter count basis, but reflect a focus on architecture optimization over raw scaling that we expect to persist into 2022. (That’s not to say significant scaling won’t happen, or that it hasn’t happened already; Microsoft Turing-NLG, released a few months ago, is over half a trillion parameters in size. But it’s safe to say that scaling won’t be done without simultaneous efficiency optimizations that were less of a focus in late-2020.)
Procedural environment generation has been a big theme in reinforcement learning. In Open-Ended Learning Leads to Generally Capable Agents, the team at DeepMind showed how training RL agents on a wide range of environments can lead to emergent behaviour associated with generalization, like trial and error and cooperation with friendly agents.
Open-ended learning (OEL) seems like an interesting wildcard, which some researchers think might be an important ingredient in the final AGI recipe. We spoke with OpenAI’s head of open-ended learning, Ken Stanley, about what role OEL might play in the future of AI on this episode of the TDS podcast.
A NeurIPS spotlight paper titled Optimal Policies Tend to Seek Power, and subsequent work by the same author, are showing that we should expect highly capable AI systems to engage in dangerous behaviour that’s misaligned with human values, by default. Specifically, highly competent agents will tend to search for states that are powerful, in the sense that they offer many downstream options. This finding makes a compelling case that AI alignment ought to be prioritized, particularly given the rate of progress we’re seeing in AI capabilities more broadly. If it really is the case that capable AI systems will be dangerous by default, active effort must be invested in safety research.
Outline:
0:00 Intro
2:15 Rise of multi-modal models
7:40 Growth of hardware and compute
13:20 Reinforcement learning
20:45 Open-ended learning
26:15 Power seeking paper
32:30 Safety and assumptions
35:20 Intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation
42:00 Mapping natural language
46:20 Timnit Gebru’s research institute
49:20 Wrap-up

Happy new year!
Our last episode of 2021 is also our 82th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Outline:
Intro
This AI-powered art app lets you paint pictures with words
AI Dungeon’s creators are launching an experimental AI-powered game platform
Announcing the Transactions on Machine Learning Research
Bigger’s Not Always Better: DeepMind’s New Language AI Is Small But Mighty 
2021 was the year of monster AI models 
U.N. talks adjourn without deal to regulate ‘killer robots’
Face Recognition Is Being Banned—but It’s Still Everywhere
Better Images of AI
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Feel free to email us your thoughts or feedback at contact@lastweekinai.com

Our 81th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Outline:
(0:00) Intro
(1:30) Meet your new A.I. best friend
(6:37) The Beatles: Get Back Used High-Tech Machine Learning To Restore The Audio
(10:26) Google, Cambridge U & Alan Turing Institute Propose PolyViT: A Universal Transformer for Image, Video, and Audio Classification
(14:00) Deep-learning model speeds extreme weather predictions
(18:23) How We Determined Crime Prediction Software Disproportionately Targeted Low-Income, Black, and Latino Neighborhoods
(23:44) Inside Tesla as Elon Musk Pushed an Unflinching Vision for Self-Driving Cars 
(27:18) Alarmed by Tesla’s public self-driving test, state legislators demand answers from DMV 
(30:15) A ​Quadruped Humanoid Robot Might Be Able To Do It All
(34:05) Forging New Pathways: Boys & Girls Clubs Teens Take AI From Idea to Application
(38:00) Outro
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Feel free to email us your thoughts or feedback at contact@lastweekinai.com