Letters
How To Build Truly Free Social Networks
It's official: Elon Musk will buy Twitter, pending approval of the transaction by the company's stockholders and the U.S. government.
Latest
The Batch Newsletter
The Batch: Recognizing Distracted Drivers, Training Fighter Pilots, Dominating the Bridge Table, Training Trillions of Parameters
It's official: Elon Musk will buy Twitter, pending approval of the transaction by the company's stockholders and the U.S. government. While some people are celebrating the deal in the name of free speech, others are worried about the platform’s future.
Tech & Society
Training Mission: AI Helps Train Air Force Fighter Pilots
An experimental AI system is helping train the next generation of fighter pilots. The U.S. Air Force is using deep learning to evaluate the progress of around 50 pilots in one of its training squadrons, Popular Science reported.
Machine Learning Research
Efficiency Experts: Mixture of Experts Makes Language Models More Efficient
The emerging generation of trillion-parameter language models take significant computation to train. Activating only a portion of the network at a time can cut the requirement dramatically and still achieve exceptional results.
Culture
Bridge to Explainable AI: AI System Outplays Human Bridge Champions
DeepMind’s AlphaGo famously dominated Go, a game in which players can see the state of play at all times. A new AI system demonstrated similar mastery of bridge, in which crucial information remains hidden.
Tech & Society
The View Through the Windshield: New Zealand Uses Computer Vision to Spot Distracted Drivers
Overhead cameras equipped with computer vision are spotting distracted drivers on the road. A system from Melbourne-based Acusensus alerts police when drivers are engaged in risky activities such as using a cell phone, not wearing a seatbelt, or speeding.
The Batch Newsletter
The Batch: How DALL·E 2 Makes Images, Like GPT-3 But More Sensible, How AI Startups Spend Their Money, Robo Real Estate Agents
Last week, Elon Musk launched a surprise attempt to acquire Twitter. The $43-billion bid was motivated, he said, by his desire to protect free speech endangered by the company’s practice of promoting some tweets while burying others. To
Business
Algorithm as Real Estate Agent: Algorithmic Buyers Purchased 1 percent of U.S. Homes in 2021
House sales priced by algorithms account for a small but growing portion of the real estate market. Companies that use algorithmic pricing models to buy and sell houses purchased roughly double the volume of transactions in two years. However, these deals may not benefit typical home buyers.
Machine Learning Research
More Realistic Pictures From Text: How the Glide Diffusion Model Generates Images from Text
OpenAI’s DALL·E got an upgrade that takes in text descriptions and produces images in styles from hand-drawn to photorealistic. The new version is a rewrite from the ground up. It uses the earlier CLIP zero-shot image classifier to represent text descriptions.
Machine Learning Research
Neural Nets + Rules = Truer Text: Jurassic-X can answer questions, check facts, solve math, and more
A new approach aims to cure text generators of their tendency to produce nonsense. AI21 Labs launched Jurassic-X, a natural language processing system that combines neural networks and rule-based programs.
Business
How AI Ventures Spend Their Capital: AI Startups Invested Billions In Other AI Startups in 2021
AI startups are putting their cash into . . . AI startups.What’s new: Young AI companies flush with venture capital are purchasing startups to expand the range of services they can offer.
Letters
Should Twitter Publish Its Ranking Algorithm?
Last week, Elon Musk launched a surprise attempt to acquire Twitter. The $43-billion bid was motivated, he said, by his desire to protect free speech endangered by the company’s practice of promoting some tweets while burying others.