Tech & Society
People granted early access to OpenAI’s latest language model are raving about its way with words — and more. Beta testers of GPT-3 are showing off the model’s ability to write business memos, craft blogs, pen tweets, and even generate computer code.
Tech & Society
Computer vision is helping sushi lovers enjoy top-quality maguro. Japanese restaurant chain Kura Sushi is using a smartphone app called Tuna Scope to grade its suppliers’ offerings, according to the news outlet The Asahi Shimbun.
Machine Learning Research
We’d all love to be able to find similar examples of our favorite cat videos. But few of us want to label thousands of similar videos of even the cutest kitties. New research makes headway in video classification when training examples are scarce.
Tech & Society
A new report details the role of AI in China’s effort to fight the coronavirus. Researchers at Synced, a China-based AI publication, describe how nearly 90 machine learning products have contributed to the country’s pandemic response.
Machine Learning Research
When the chips are down, humans can track critical details without being distracted by irrelevancies. New research helps reinforcement learning models similarly focus on the most important details.
The Batch Newsletter
I received a copy of Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams as a Christmas gift — back in the pre-Covid era — and finished it last weekend. This book by Matthew Walker, director of UC Berkeley’s sleep and neuroimaging lab...
Science
A mechanical lab assistant could accelerate chemistry research.What’s new: Researchers at the University of Liverpool trained a mobile robot arm to navigate a lab, operate equipment, handle samples, and obtain results far faster than a human scientist.
Machine Learning Research
Need a wardrobe upgrade? You could ask the fashion mavens at Netflix’s Queer Eye — or you could use a new neural network. Researchers at Amazon propose Category-based Subspace Attention Network (CSA-Net) to predict and retrieve compatible garments and accessories that complement one another.
Business
The same technology that has bedeviled Hollywood stars and roiled politics is easing corporate communications. Synthesia generates training and sales videos featuring photorealistic, synthetic talking heads that read personalized scripts in any of 34 languages.
Business
Companies in Africa and the Middle East are building AI capacity in very different ways, a new study found. AI is growing fast in both regions despite shortages of talent and data.
Letters
I received a copy of Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams as a Christmas gift — back in the pre-Covid era — and finished it last weekend. This book by Matthew Walker, director of UC Berkeley’s sleep and neuroimaging lab, is a useful reminder of the importance of sleep...
The Batch Newsletter
Last week, I wrote about the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) policy that would have forced international students to leave the country if their university went fully online to manage the risk of Covid-19.