Deep Learning

Self-driving cars is a hot topic these days, eclipsed only by the recent Facebook drama. And because of the deaths involved, it has become an emotional one as well. While the incidents should encourage the industry to take stock of its technology, it shouldn’t cause development and research to come to a grinding halt. Especially when the side hustlers at Microsoft Garage have developed a way to safely teach these autonomous driving AIs. And they’re doing so with the age-old idea of simulations.

Continue Reading

Google's Magenta AI has spawned an unexpected hardware device, the NSynth Super synthesizer that uses machine learning to create new sounds. Based on the Magenta research project, it's built using the NSynth neutral synthesizer that Google released last year, embodying the AI smarts in a tactile physical interface.

Continue Reading

Google has updated its Arts and Culture app with some nifty new functionality. If you download the app (or apply the new update, assuming you already had the app installed), you can share a selfie and have the app attempt to find your fine art doppelgänger. Unsurprisingly, this new functionality has taken the internet by storm, receiving a lot of attention on social media over the weekend.

Continue Reading

Amazon made a rather surprising announcement today, revealing a product that seems to go toe-to-toe in many ways with Google Clips. Say hello to the AWS DeepLens camera, a new camera that's designed with deep learning AI in mind. That's similar to what Google is trying to do with Clips, but while that camera is aimed at consumers, the DeepLens camera is targeted toward developers.

Continue Reading

Google has snapped up the former head of Tesla's Autopilot, with Chris Lattner joining the Google Brain deep learning artificial intelligence project. Lattner was, until recently, leading Tesla's work on semi-autonomous and autonomous driving, having been recruited in January of this year. The electric car company has been one of the most ambitious in its public commitments to making driverless cars practical, with founder and CEO Elon Musk promising that Tesla vehicles being built today will be, with the right software and legal framework, capable of full Level 5 autonomy in the coming years.

Continue Reading

The AI invasion isn’t coming. It’s already hear. Forget Skynet, we already have Siri, Cortana, Google Assistant, and, now, Bixby. But AI is found in more than those. It’s also present in Google Search, Office Lens, email, photos, and, soon, your head. No, we’re not talking about plugging your head to a computer, but something close. Microsoft researchers have just revealed how the next version of the HoloLens will include a custom-made, special-purpose chip whose processing power will be dedicated solely to, what else, AI.

Continue Reading

In September of last year, Intel announced that it had acquired Movidius. Modivius is a company that does a lot of different things, from making avoidance sensors for DJI drones to developing deep learning technologies with a handful of different partners. Today we're seeing some of the deep learning fruits of that buyout, with Intel introducing us to the Movidius Neural Compute Stick.

Continue Reading

Although they have always been a source of fantasy as well as nightmares, robots and artificial intelligence have taken the spotlight in the recent years, even in mainstream media. One recurring theme has always been about how these technologies will soon replace humans, mostly in the work place. Those fears were perhaps magnified when AlphaGo, from Google-owned DeepMind, defeated legendary Go player Lee Sedol. Google perhaps expected some level of outrage but it says it was surprised to instead see some contemplation as human players try to learn the never before seen moves that the AI made.

Continue Reading

Anyone who has followed crime procedural TV shows, particularly the likes of CSI, will probably be familiar with the "zoom in, enhance" method of pulling evidence out of thin air, so to speak. It has become so common an occurrence that it has transformed both into a trope but also into a sort of holy grail for computer scientists. The latter bunch at the Google Brain deep learning lab might have come across a process that almost comes close to fiction. Well, almost.

Continue Reading

AMD is taking on artificial intelligence, deep learning, and autonomous driving, aiming to get its new chips into the smarter tech of tomorrow. The graphics chip maker has launched AMD Radeon Instinct, a combination of hardware and open-source software which it hopes will make its GPU accelerators more broadly adopted in machine intelligence. While it may be lagging behind NVIDIA in tackling the segment, it's hoping it has two big advantages that will give it the momentum to overtake.

Continue Reading

Google used algorithms to create trippy, dreamy images, and now MIT has done something similar...only with a horror slant to keep in theme with Halloween. Called the Nightmare Machine, this deep learning algorithm takes an image and rewrites it to look as if it were plucked from a horror movie. The resulting images are dark, creepy, and in some cases somewhat gory looking and certainly disturbing.

Continue Reading

DeepMind, the Google artificial intelligence division behind the champion-defeating AlphaGo bot, has revealed that it's managed to create some of the most realistic, human level speech ever achieved from a machine. Called WaveNet, the new AI is said to act as a deep neural network that's capable of generating speech by sampling real human speech and forming raw audio waveforms.

Continue Reading