Police use of Clearview AI’s facial recognition increased 26% after Capitol raid

Clearview AI reports that police use of the company’s highly-controversial facial recognition system jumped 26 percent following the raid on the Capitol.

The facial recognition system relies on scraping the data of people from across the web without their explicit consent, a practice which has naturally raised some eyebrows—including the ACLU’s which called it a “nightmare scenario” for privacy.

Around three billion images are said to have been scraped for...

11 January 2021 | Face Recognition

OpenAI’s latest neural network creates images from written descriptions

OpenAI has debuted its latest jaw-dropping innovation, an image-generating neural network called DALL·E.

DALL·E is a 12-billion parameter version of GPT-3 which is trained to generate images from text descriptions.

“We find that DALL·E is able to create plausible images for a great variety of sentences that explore the compositional structure of language,“ OpenAI explains.

Generated images can range from drawings, to objects, and even manipulated...

6 January 2021 | Neural Network

Google is telling its scientists to give AI a ‘positive’ spin

Google has reportedly been telling its scientists to give AI a “positive” spin in research papers.

Documents obtained by Reuters suggest that, in at least three cases, Google’s researchers were requested to refrain from being critical of AI technology.

A “sensitive topics” review was established by Google earlier this year to catch papers which cast a negative light on AI ahead of their publication.

Google asks its scientists to consult with legal,...

24 December 2020 | Ethics

Chinese AI chipmaker Horizon endeavours to raise $700M to rival NVIDIA

AI chipmaker Horizon Robotics is seeking to raise $700 million in a new funding round.

Horizon is often seen as potentially becoming China’s equivalent of NVIDIA. The company is founded by Dr Kai Yu, a prominent industry figure with quite the credentials.

Yu led Baidu’s AI Research lab for three years, founded the Baidu Institute of Deep Learning, and launched the company’s autonomous driving business unit.

Furthermore, Yu has taught at Stanford...

22 December 2020 | China

Facebook is developing a news-summarising AI called TL;DR

Facebook is developing an AI called TL;DR which summarises news into shorter snippets.

Anyone who’s spent much time on the web will know what TL;DR stands for⁠—but, for everyone else, it’s an acronym for “Too Long, Didn’t Read”.

It’s an understandable sentiment we’ve all felt at some point. People lead busy lives. Some outlets now even specialise in short, at-a-glance news.

The problem is, it’s hard to get the full picture of a story in just...

16 December 2020 | Facebook

From experimentation to implementation: How AI is proving its worth in financial services

For financial institutions, recovering from the pandemic will put an end to tentative experiments with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), and demand their large-scale adoption. The crisis has required financial organisations to respond to customer needs around the clock. Many are therefore transforming with ever-increasing pace, but they must ensure that their core critical operations continue to run smoothly. This has sparked an interest in AI and ML solutions, which...

15 December 2020 | Adoption

EU human rights agency issues report on AI ethical considerations

The European Union’s Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) has issued a report on AI which delves into the ethical considerations which must be made about the technology.

FRA’s report is titled Getting The Future Right and opens with some of the ways AI is already making lives better—such as helping with cancer diagnosis, and even predicting where burglaries are likely to take place.

“The possibilities seem endless,” writes Michael O’Flaherty, Director of the FRA,...

14 December 2020 | Adoption

Former NHS surgeon creates AI ‘virtual patient’ for remote training

A former NHS surgeon has created an AI-powered “virtual patient” which helps to keep skills sharp during a time when most in-person training is on hold.

Dr Alex Young is a trained orthopaedic and trauma surgeon who founded Virti and set out to use emerging technologies to provide immersive training for both new healthcare professionals and experienced ones looking to hone their skills.

COVID-19 has put most in-person training on hold to minimise transmission risks....

11 December 2020 | Healthcare

Algorithmia: AI budgets are increasing but deployment challenges remain

A new report from Algorithmia has found that enterprise budgets for AI are rapidly increasing but significant deployment challenges remain.

Algorithmia’s 2021 Enterprise Trends in Machine Learning report features the views of 403 business leaders involved with machine learning initiatives.

Diego Oppenheimer, CEO of Algorithmia, says:

“COVID-19 has caused rapid change which has challenged our assumptions in many areas. In this rapidly changing environment,...

10 December 2020 | Adoption

AWS announces nine major updates for its ML platform SageMaker

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced nine major new updates for its cloud-based machine learning platform, SageMaker.

SageMaker aims to provide a machine learning service which can be used to build, train, and deploy ML models for virtually any use case.

During this year’s re:Invent conference, AWS made several announcements to further improve SageMaker’s capabilities.

Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of Amazon Machine Learning at AWS,...

9 December 2020 | Amazon