Letters
How to Learn Coding
I’d like to share a programming tip that I’ve used for years. A large part of programming involves googling for code snippets you need on Stack Overflow and other websites. (Shh. Don’t tell the nondevelopers. ????)
Latest
The Batch Newsletter
The Batch: Training 1 Trillion Parameters, Medical AI Gets a Shot in the Arm, Does Bert Have Common Sense?, Revitalizing Chess
I’d like to share a programming tip that I’ve used for years. A large part of programming involves googling for code snippets you need on Stack Overflow and other websites. (Shh. Don’t tell the nondevelopers. ????)
Machine Learning Research
Optimizer Shootout: An evaluation of 14 deep learning optimizers
Everyone has a favorite optimization method, but it’s not always clear which one works best in a given situation. New research aims to establish a set of benchmarks. Researchers evaluated 14 popular optimizers using the Deep Optimization Benchmark Suite some of them introduced last year.
Tech & Society
The Geopolitics of Data: How data impacts military uses of AI
Some politicians and pundits believe that, in the AI era, the military with the most data wins. A new analysis disputes this notion. A report by Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology examines the relative strengths of the Chinese and U.S. militaries in AI.
Science
Planet Hunter: AI identifies planets from Kepler telescope data.
A machine learning model is scouring the cosmos for undiscovered planets. Astronomers from the University of Warwick developed a system that learned to identify faraway worlds in a dataset of thousands of candidates.
Machine Learning Research
Fewer Labels, More Learning: How SimCLRv2 improves image recognition with fewer labels
Large models pretrained in an unsupervised fashion and then fine-tuned on a smaller corpus of labeled data have achieved spectacular results in natural language processing. New research pushes forward with a similar approach to computer vision.
Business
Credit Where It’s Due: How Visa powers real-time credit card approval with AI
A neural network is helping credit card users continue to shop even when the lender’s credit-approval network goes down. Visa developed a deep learning system that analyzes individual cardholders’ behavior in real time to predict whether credit card transactions should be approved or denied.
Letters
Coding AI is the New Literacy
Today we take it for granted that many people know how to read and write. Someday, I hope, it will be just as common that people know how to write code. Several hundred years ago, society didn’t view language literacy as a necessary skill.
The Batch Newsletter
The Batch: Data for Defense, Predicting Credit Approvals, More Learning From Fewer Labels, Hunting for Planets
Today we take it for granted that many people know how to read and write. Someday, I hope, it will be just as common that people know how to write code. Several hundred years ago, society didn’t view language literacy as a necessary skill.
Machine Learning Research
The Transformation Continues: Technique boosts transformer performance on long sequences.
Transformer networks are gaining popularity as a high-accuracy alternative to recurrent neural networks. But they can run slowly when they’re applied to long sequences.
Tech & Society
U.S. Proposes National AI Centers: U.S. proposes $180 million for AI research.
The White House called for new funding for AI research including a constellation of research centers. Nonetheless, the U.S. government’s annual spending on the technology still would lag behind that of several other...
Tech & Society
Wimbledon in a Box: Generative AI technique creates imaginary tennis matches.
Covid shut down the tennis tournament at Wimbledon this year, but a new model simulates showdowns between the sport’s greatest players. Stanford researchers developed Vid2Player, a system that simulates the footwork, positioning, and strokes of tennis pros like Roger Federer.