Letters
Happy New Year! Three Aspirations for AI in 2021
Happy New Year! As we enter 2021, I want to share with you three wishes I have for AI in the upcoming year. I hope we can: Narrow the gap between proofs-of-concept and production.
Latest
Interviews & Essays
Ilya Sutskever: OpenAI’s co-founder on building multimodal AI models
The past year was the first in which general-purpose models became economically useful. GPT-3, in particular, demonstrated that large language models have surprising linguistic competence and the ability to perform a wide variety of useful tasks.
Interviews & Essays
Harry Shum: Tsinghua University’s Harry Shum on how AI is changing creativity
In 2021, I envision that the AI community will create more tools to unleash human creativity. AI will help people across the globe to communicate and express emotions and moods in their own unique ways.
Interviews & Essays
Matthew Mattina: Arm research leader explains how TinyML is bringing AI to phones and other edge devices
Look at the tip of a standard #2 pencil. Now, imagine performing over one trillion multiplication operations in the area of that pencil tip every second. This can be accomplished using today’s 7nm semiconductor technology.
Interviews & Essays
Stanford professor Fei-Fei on how a national research cloud would boost AI
The United States has been a leader in science and technology for decades, and all nations have benefitted from its innovations. But U.S. leadership in AI is not guaranteed.
Interviews & Essays
Ayanna Howard: How to teach ethics to the next generation of AI builders
As AI engineers, we have tools to design and build any technology-based solution we can dream of. But many AI developers don’t consider it their responsibility to address potential negative consequences as a part of this work.
The Batch Newsletter
The Batch: Biggest AI Stories of 2020: Covid Triage, Fun With GANs, Disinfo Whack-A-Mole, GPT Superstar, ImageNet Recall, FDA Approvals
Every year for the past decade, I flew to Singapore or Hong Kong to celebrate my mother’s birthday with her on December 22. This year, for the first time, we did it via Zoom.
Letters
The Power of Gratitude
Every year for the past decade, I flew to Singapore or Hong Kong to celebrate my mother’s birthday with her on December 22. This year, for the first time, we did it via Zoom.
Tech & Society
Writer’s Unblock: Language models keep getting bigger and better.
Neural networks for natural language processing got bigger, more prolific, and more fun to play with. Language models, which already had grown to gargantuan size, continued to swell, yielding chatbots that mimic AI luminaries and have very strange ideas about horses.
Tech & Society
The Model Will See You Now: The rise of medical AI in 2020
Institutional hurdles to AI for medicine began to fall, setting the stage for widespread clinical use of deep learning in medical devices and treatments. DeepMind’s AlphaFold model determined the three-dimensional shape of a protein in just hours.
Tech & Society
Algorithms Against Disinformation: How Facebook, Twitter, and more fought disinfo in 2020.
The worldwide pandemic and a contentious U.S. election whipped up a storm of automated disinformation, and some big AI companies reaped the whirlwind.
Tech & Society
Representing the Underrepresented: Many important AI datasets contain bias.
Some of deep learning’s bedrock datasets came under scrutiny as researchers combed them for built-in biases. Researchers found that popular datasets impart biases against socially marginalized groups to trained models due to the ways the datasets were compiled, labeled, and used.