Interviews & Essays
Chip Huyen: AI that adapts to changing conditions
Until recently, big data processing has been dominated by batch systems like MapReduce and Spark, which allow us to periodically process a large amount of data very efficiently.
Latest
Interviews & Essays
Alexei Efros: Learning from the ground up
Things are really starting to get going in the field of AI. After many years (decades?!) of focusing on algorithms, the AI community is finally ready to accept the central role of data and the high-capacity models that are capable of taking advantage of this data.
Interviews & Essays
Wolfram Burgard: Train robots in the real world
Robots are tremendously useful machines, and I would like to see them applied to every task where they can do some good. Yet we don’t have enough programmers for all this hardware and all these tasks.
Interviews & Essays
Abeba Birhane: Clean up web datasets
From language to vision models, deep neural networks are marked by improved performance, higher efficiency, and better generalizations. Yet, these systems are also marked by perpetuation of bias and injustice.
Tech & Society
Voices for the Voiceless: Generative AI models are creating voices for Hollywood and video games.
Musicians and filmmakers adopted AI as a standard part of the audio-production toolbox. What happened: Professional media makers embraced neural networks that generate new sounds and modify old ones. Voice actors bristled.
Tech & Society
Transformers Take Over: Transformers Applied to Vision, Language, Video, and More
In 2021, transformers were harnessed to discover drugs, recognize speech, and paint pictures — and much more.
Tech & Society
Multimodal AI Takes Off: Multimodal Models, such as CLIP and DALL·E, are taking over AI.
While models like GPT-3 and EfficientNet, which work on text and images respectively, are responsible for some of deep learning’s highest-profile successes, approaches that find relationships between text and images made impressive
The Batch Newsletter
The Batch: Top AI Stories of 2021: Transformers Take Over, Models Balloon, Multimodal AI Takes Off, Governments Crack Down
As we approach the end of 2021, you may be winding down work and gearing up for the winter holiday. I’m looking forward to taking a break from work and hope you are too.
Letters
The Spirit of Giving in AI and Beyond
As we approach the end of 2021, you may be winding down work and gearing up for the winter holiday. I’m looking forward to taking a break from work and hope you are too.
Tech & Society
Governments Lay Down the Law: Governments around the world increasingly regulate AI.
Legislators worldwide wrote new laws — some proposed, some enacted — to rein in societal impacts of automation.What happened: Authorities at all levels ratcheted up regulatory pressure as
Tech & Society
Trillions of Parameters: Are AI models with trillions of parameters the new normal?
The trend toward ever-larger models crossed the threshold from immense to ginormous. Google kicked off 2021 with Switch Transformer, the first published work to exceed a trillion parameters, weighing in at 1.6 trillion.
Machine Learning Research
Image Transformations Unmasked: CNNs for vision that aren't fooled by changing backgrounds.
If you change an image by moving its subject within the frame, a well trained convolutional neural network may not recognize the fundamental similarity between the two versions. New research aims to make CNN wise to such alterations.