Letters
How AI Can Strengthen Democracy
Last Wednesday, the U.S. Capitol building was overrun by insurrectionists at the moment when members of Congress were certifying the results of a national election.
Tech & Society
Tech & Society
Tell Me a Picture: OpenAI's two new multimodal AI models, CLIP and DALL·E
Two new models show a surprisingly sharp sense of the relationship between words and images. OpenAI, the for-profit research lab, announced a pair of models that have produced impressive results in multimodal learning: DALL·E.
Tech & Society
Online Clues to Mental Illness: NLP model spots signs of mental illness in Facebook posts.
Can social media posts reveal early signs of mental illness? A new machine learning model shows promising results. Researchers developed a model that analyzes messages and images posted by Facebook users for indicators of psychological problems.
Tech & Society
U.S. New Year’s Resolutions for AI: All the AI programs authorized in the 2021 NDAA.
U.S. lawmakers authorized a slew of national programs that promote artificial intelligence research, development, and deployment, and support efforts to make sure the results are ethical and trustworthy.
Letters
AI Concentrates Power and Wealth
In my letter last week, I alluded to the way AI tends to concentrate power and wealth. This tendency worries me, and I believe it deserves more attention. The U.S. government has been looking into these winner-take-most dynamics at a few leading technology companies...
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.
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.
Tech & Society
This Snowman Does Not Exist: The rise of deepfakes in 2020
While generative adversarial networks were infiltrating cultural, social, and scientific spheres, they quietly transformed the web into a bottomless well of synthetic images of . . . well, you name it.
Tech & Society
Coping With Covid: How AI helped fight Covid-19.
AI accelerated the search for a coronavirus vaccine, detected Covid-19 cases, and otherwise softened the pandemic’s blow. Machine learning researchers worldwide scrambled to harness the technology against the coronavirus.