The Batch: Biggest AI Stories of 2020: Covid Triage, Fun With GANs, Disinfo Whack-A-Mole, GPT Superstar, ImageNet Recall, FDA Approvals
Dec 23, 2020

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.

10 min read
The Batch: Biggest AI Stories of 2020: Covid Triage, Fun With GANs, Disinfo Whack-A-Mole, GPT Superstar, ImageNet Recall, FDA Approvals
Dec 23, 2020

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.

10 min read
The Batch: New Coronavirus Treatments, Reimagining Robotaxis, Opening Historical Archives, Streamlining Simulations
Dec 16, 2020

The Batch: New Coronavirus Treatments, Reimagining Robotaxis, Opening Historical Archives, Streamlining Simulations

When a researcher works for a company, what rights should they have to publish their work, and what rights should the company that sponsored the work have? This issue has come up many times in the AI community across many companies...

9 min read
The Batch: New Coronavirus Treatments, Reimagining Robotaxis, Opening Historical Archives, Streamlining Simulations
Dec 16, 2020

The Batch: New Coronavirus Treatments, Reimagining Robotaxis, Opening Historical Archives, Streamlining Simulations

When a researcher works for a company, what rights should they have to publish their work, and what rights should the company that sponsored the work have? This issue has come up many times in the AI community across many companies...

9 min read
The Batch: Autonomous Helium Balloons, Seeing Eye AI, Muppet Models Estimate Weights and Measures, Labor Unions Fight Automation
Dec 09, 2020

The Batch: Autonomous Helium Balloons, Seeing Eye AI, Muppet Models Estimate Weights and Measures, Labor Unions Fight Automation

Like many people in the AI community, I am saddened by the sudden departure from Google of ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru. Timnit is a tireless champion of diversity and fairness in AI.

9 min read
The Batch: Autonomous Helium Balloons, Seeing Eye AI, Muppet Models Estimate Weights and Measures, Labor Unions Fight Automation
Dec 09, 2020

The Batch: Autonomous Helium Balloons, Seeing Eye AI, Muppet Models Estimate Weights and Measures, Labor Unions Fight Automation

Like many people in the AI community, I am saddened by the sudden departure from Google of ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru. Timnit is a tireless champion of diversity and fairness in AI.

9 min read
The Batch: Intelligent Agent Vs. Fighter Pilot, GAN for Pajama Zooming, When AI Goes Wrong, Multimodal Learning for Medicine
Dec 02, 2020

The Batch: Intelligent Agent Vs. Fighter Pilot, GAN for Pajama Zooming, When AI Goes Wrong, Multimodal Learning for Medicine

The rise of AI creates opportunities for new startups that can move humanity forward. In the 1990s, the internet was embraced successfully by incumbent companies including Apple and Microsoft, but it also inspired hugely impactful...

8 min read
The Batch: Intelligent Agent Vs. Fighter Pilot, GAN for Pajama Zooming, When AI Goes Wrong, Multimodal Learning for Medicine
Dec 02, 2020

The Batch: Intelligent Agent Vs. Fighter Pilot, GAN for Pajama Zooming, When AI Goes Wrong, Multimodal Learning for Medicine

The rise of AI creates opportunities for new startups that can move humanity forward. In the 1990s, the internet was embraced successfully by incumbent companies including Apple and Microsoft, but it also inspired hugely impactful...

8 min read
The Batch: Government AI Falls Short, Face Recognition for Bears, Research Papers in One Sentence, Counting Crowds
Nov 25, 2020

The Batch: Government AI Falls Short, Face Recognition for Bears, Research Papers in One Sentence, Counting Crowds

Over the last two weeks, I described the importance of clean, consistent labels and how to use human-level performance (HLP) to trigger a review of whether labeling instructions need to be reviewed.

9 min read
The Batch: Government AI Falls Short, Face Recognition for Bears, Research Papers in One Sentence, Counting Crowds
Nov 25, 2020

The Batch: Government AI Falls Short, Face Recognition for Bears, Research Papers in One Sentence, Counting Crowds

Over the last two weeks, I described the importance of clean, consistent labels and how to use human-level performance (HLP) to trigger a review of whether labeling instructions need to be reviewed.

9 min read
The Batch: Bias In Surprising Places, Retail Models Adjust to Covid, Faster Transformers, AI Patents Explode
Nov 18, 2020

The Batch: Bias In Surprising Places, Retail Models Adjust to Covid, Faster Transformers, AI Patents Explode

Last week, I wrote about the limitation of using human-level performance (HLP) as a metric to beat in machine learning applications for manufacturing and other fields. In this letter, I would like to show why beating HLP isn’t always the best way to improve performance.

8 min read
The Batch: Bias In Surprising Places, Retail Models Adjust to Covid, Faster Transformers, AI Patents Explode
Nov 18, 2020

The Batch: Bias In Surprising Places, Retail Models Adjust to Covid, Faster Transformers, AI Patents Explode

Last week, I wrote about the limitation of using human-level performance (HLP) as a metric to beat in machine learning applications for manufacturing and other fields. In this letter, I would like to show why beating HLP isn’t always the best way to improve performance.

8 min read
The Batch: AI Predicts the Vote, Face Recognition Looks for Criminals, Model Cow Makes Milk, Transformers Prove Theorems
Nov 11, 2020

The Batch: AI Predicts the Vote, Face Recognition Looks for Criminals, Model Cow Makes Milk, Transformers Prove Theorems

Beating human-level performance (HLP) has been a goal of academic research in machine learning from speech recognition to X-ray diagnosis. When your model outperforms humans, you can argue that you’ve reached a significant milestone and publish a paper!

11 min read
The Batch: AI Predicts the Vote, Face Recognition Looks for Criminals, Model Cow Makes Milk, Transformers Prove Theorems
Nov 11, 2020

The Batch: AI Predicts the Vote, Face Recognition Looks for Criminals, Model Cow Makes Milk, Transformers Prove Theorems

Beating human-level performance (HLP) has been a goal of academic research in machine learning from speech recognition to X-ray diagnosis. When your model outperforms humans, you can argue that you’ve reached a significant milestone and publish a paper!

11 min read
The Batch: Turning Tables on Face Recognition, Testing GPT-3, Recognizing Disinformation, Detecting Deepfakes
Nov 04, 2020

The Batch: Turning Tables on Face Recognition, Testing GPT-3, Recognizing Disinformation, Detecting Deepfakes

As I write this letter, the vote count is underway in yesterday’s U.S. presidential election. The race has turned out to be tight. In their final forecast last night, the political analysts at fivethirtyeight.com suggested an 89 percent chance that Joe Biden would win.

10 min read
The Batch: Turning Tables on Face Recognition, Testing GPT-3, Recognizing Disinformation, Detecting Deepfakes
Nov 04, 2020

The Batch: Turning Tables on Face Recognition, Testing GPT-3, Recognizing Disinformation, Detecting Deepfakes

As I write this letter, the vote count is underway in yesterday’s U.S. presidential election. The race has turned out to be tight. In their final forecast last night, the political analysts at fivethirtyeight.com suggested an 89 percent chance that Joe Biden would win.

10 min read

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