AI hunts illegal password sharers of video services

Synamedia has developed an AI which can track down the many users who share video streaming passwords with friends and family.

The solution, Credentials Sharing Insight, helps to source missing income for services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu.

Media research firm Magid claims 26% of millennials share passwords for video streaming services. Parks Associates, meanwhile, predicts that in 2021, $9.9 billion of pay-tv revenues and $1.2 billion of OTT revenues will be...

Talent has begun leaking from DeepMind in recent months

If DeepMind is on your CV, you could walk into most tech companies and be offered a job on the spot with a six-figure salary. The firm is full of in-demand talent and its CEO once bragged that no employees had ever left.

Speaking to The Guardian in 2016, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said:

“We are able to literally get the best scientists from each country each year. So we’ll have, say, the person that won the Physics Olympiad in Poland, the person who got the top...

Capgemini: AI is a $340 billion opportunity for the retail sector

French digital consultation firm Capgemini predicts AI offers a yet untapped $340 billion opportunity for the retail sector.

Retail is a major focus of AI but there’s debate over whether it will have a positive or negative on society, especially with regards to jobs. Some believe AI will assist existing jobs while others take a view it will replace workers.

Capgemini found just one percent of retailers have achieved the level of AI deployment needed to reach its full...

Apple promotes AI engineer poached from Google to SVP

Sometimes it’s difficult keeping track of Silicon Valley appointments, but John Giannandrea’s journey is one worth keeping tabs on. Giannandrea is one of Silicon Valley’s brightest minds in AI. He came under the spotlight for heading Google’s search and artificial intelligence operations. After spending eight years at Google, back in April he was poached by Apple to lead its Siri and CoreML efforts. His positive impact at Apple was clearly noted. In a statement, Apple CEO Tim...

AI is at risk of bias due to serious gender gap problem

AI needs to be created by a diverse range of developers to prevent bias, but the World Economic Forum (WEF) has found a serious gender gap. Gender gaps in STEM careers have been a problem for some time, but it’s not often the end product matters what gender it was developed by. AI is about to be everywhere, and it matters that it’s representative of those it serves. In a report published this week, the WEF wrote:

“The equal contribution of women and men in...

Microsoft wants AI to predict when a PC is going to be infected

Microsoft wants to harness AI's incredible prediction abilities to detect PC malware attacks before they even happen. The company has sponsored a competition on Kaggle which challenges data scientists to create models which predict if a device is likely to become infected with malware given a current machine state. In a blog post, Microsoft wrote:

“The competition provides academics and researchers with varied backgrounds a fresh opportunity to work on a...

European AI researchers form group over falling behind fears

A group of European researchers are coming together in a bid to advance AI research over fears the continent will fall behind. The initiative will be called the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) and was launched on 6th December at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) meeting in Montreal, Canada. Almost 200 researchers signed an open letter published in April warning AI investment and expertise in Europe is lagging behind the likes of North...

AI beats AI: AlphaZero becomes the best game player in history

DeepMind – a UK-based subsidiary of Google’s parent organisation Alphabet – has beat rival AI records with AlphaZero. The AI, introduced by DeepMind in a research published in Science on 6th November 2018, was put against three of the world’s most complex board games and their current AI record holders. This included world-champion chess AI Stockfish, DeepMind’s very own AlphaGo Zero – known as the best Go player in history – and elmo, winner of the 27th annual World Computer...

AI targets cryptocurrency ‘pump-and-dump’ schemes

Pump-and-dump schemes result in serious penalties in regulated markets, but in the wild west of cryptocurrencies, they’re a regular occurrence. For those unaware, a pump-and-dump is typically a group of individuals who use their combined buying power to artificially inflate the price of an asset before selling off near its peak. Outsiders believe the price is a sign of increased interest and end up buying high. Anonymous messaging app Telegram is often used for organising these groups,...

Nvidia’s AI can turn real-life videos into 3D renders

Nvidia has developed an AI which can turn real-life videos into 3D renders – making creating games and VR experiences simpler. Creating 3D renders is a painstaking and time-consuming process requiring specific skills and can be incredibly costly. By reducing the barriers, Nvidia could enable more ideas to move from concept into reality. During the NeurIPS AI conference in Montreal, Nvidia set up a dedicated area showing its technology. The company used its DGX-1 supercomputer for the...