Deep Learning

The holy grail of AI has always been to enable computers to learn the way humans do. The most powerful AIs today, however, still rely on having certain known rules, like rules for a game of chess or Go. Human learning, however, is often messy in inferential, learning the rules of life as we go. DeepMind has long been trying to create such AIs using games as their environment and test suite. Google's sister company focusing on AI research has just revealed its latest achievement in MuZero, an AI that can master a game without learning the rules beforehand.

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Alphabet's DeepMind has used its AI system to figure out a five decade old mystery in biology, the company has announced today, using AlphaFold to help understand protein behaviors. The company came to notoriety for its neural network developments, which demonstrated their human-besting capabilities in playing chess, go, and shogi.

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Thanks to its ubiquity via Google's other services, Gmail accounts have become prime targets for malicious or even illegal activities. It isn't just spam or phishing scams either, as emails can also include files that, when downloaded and opened, could compromise users' devices and files. That's why Google is ramping up its efforts to block these attachments from even reaching your Gmail inbox in the first place and it's doing it with a little help from Google's favorite machine learning special sauce.

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You often hear about (somewhat exaggerated) articles about how bots and especially AI will be replacing human workers in the not so distant future. That is a possibility but one that is still far from becoming reality, especially when life-critical decisions have to be made. Still, it's quite impressive how far AI has come, especially when it manages to outdo professionals in accuracy, like when detecting breast cancer.

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Machine learning and AI have definitely made some impact in today's society but none more so than their potential for abuse. Never mind chatbots, deepfakes are the new media darling when it comes to demonstrating how such technology could be used to spread misinformation. Perhaps trying to defuse the tension, Snapchat will soon be offering a new feature that uses that very same machine learning principles to put users' faces on other people's heads to make a cameo that is far too obviously fake to deceive anyone.

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Despite trying to paint an image of being a serious, enterprise-friendly corporation, Google is still pretty much the stereotypical geek among the tech giants. It just loves to solve its problems with machine learning and AI, which is understandable given the amount of data it has to wrestle with. But while there are things that can be efficiently solved with advanced machine learning, some things, like recommending apps for users to install and use from Google Play Store, need a bit of human touch.

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AI and machine learning have crept into almost every part of modern technology and products but one of its most whimsical applications is face-swapping. Dubbed "deepfakes", these programs can almost convincingly stitch your face on someone else's. One such app named ZAO became an overnight sensation in China because of how impressively convincing its end results were. That, however, quickly gave way to fear and concern once it became evident how the technology could be misused for criminal acts.

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It's time for the RTX 2080 Ti to move over, because there's a new card climbing to the top of the RTX heap today. NVIDIA has officially unveiled the TITAN RTX, which is something we probably all assumed was on the way. NVIDIA, as you might imagine, is touting this as "the world's most powerful desktop GPU," and it's definitely got a price tag to match that designation.

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Amazon's DeepLens AI camera has begun shipping, offering developers a turnkey way to get started on deep learning, computer vision, and more, all packaged into a standalone gadget smaller than an Echo. Announced late last year, the AWS DeepLens camera is in reality a compact computer wearing a camera hat, and designed to be a gateway to using Amazon's various cloud services.

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Formally, Google I/O is the company annual event to connect with developers as well as partners spanning its entire platform and product range. It is also a time for Google to share its direction not just for specific products but for the company as a whole as well. So while the schedule and topics of talks are public, its grand vision, expressed in keynotes, is still under wraps. Given Google's focus these past months, however, we can pretty much predict what it will be delivering on stage in a few hours.

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Advancements in machine learning and computer imaging are making impressive but impossible scenes in crime drama shows finally possible. Like the infamous "zoom in, enhance" CSI method. The latest achievement comes from NVIDIA, who has been aggressively pushing its silicon, like the Tesla V100 GPU as the processor of machine learning research. Unlike the aforementioned enhancing technique, this deep learning technique is instead able to fill in holes and missing parts in images with something else that looks deceptively part of the original.

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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.

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