You may not have noticed, but we are living in an intellectual golden age.
Since the intelligence test was invented more than 100 years ago, our IQ scores have been steadily increasing. Even the average person today would have been considered a genius compared to someone born in 1919 – a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect.
We may have to enjoy it while we can. The most recent evidence suggests that this trend may now be slowing. It may even be reversing, meaning that we have already passed the summit of human intellectual potential. Read More
Monthly Archives: July 2019
How U.S. Tech Giants Are Helping to Build China’s Surveillance State
An American organization founded by tech giants Google and IBM is working with a company that is helping China’s authoritarian government conduct mass surveillance against its citizens, The Intercept can reveal.
The OpenPower Foundation — a nonprofit led by Google and IBM executives with the aim of trying to “drive innovation” — has set up a collaboration between IBM, Chinese company Semptian, and U.S. chip manufacturer Xilinx. Together, they have worked to advance a breed of microprocessors that enable computers to analyze vast amounts of data more efficiently.
Shenzhen-based Semptian is using the devices to enhance the capabilities of internet surveillance and censorship technology it provides to human rights-abusing security agencies in China, according to sources and documents. A company employee said that its technology is being used to covertly monitor the internet activity of 200 million people. Read More
Superhuman AI for multiplayer poker
In recent years there have been great strides in artificial intelligence (AI), with games often serving as challenge problems, benchmarks, and milestones for progress. Poker has served for decades as such a challenge problem. Past successes in such benchmarks, including poker, have been limited to two-player games. However, poker in particular is traditionally played with more than two players. Multiplayer games present fundamental additional issues beyond those in two-player games, and multiplayer poker is a recognized AI milestone. In this paper we present Pluribus, an AI that we show is stronger than top human professionals in six-player no-limit Texas hold’em poker, the most popular form of poker played by humans. Read More
A Benchmark for Machine Learning from an Academic/Industry Cooperative
MLPerf is a consortium involving more than 40 leading companies and university researchers, which has released several rounds of results. MLPerf’s goals are:
Accelerate progress in ML via fair and useful measurement
Encourage innovation across state-of-the-art ML systems
Serve both industrial and research communities
Enforce replicability to ensure reliable results
Keep benchmark effort affordable so all can play Read More
The Vision Behind MLPerf
A broad ML benchmark suite for measuring the performance of ML software frameworks, ML hardware accelerators, and ML cloud and edge platforms.
… since 2012 the amount of compute used in the largest AI training runs has been increasing exponentially with a 3.5 month-doubling time (by comparison, Moore’s Law had an 18-month doubling period). Since 2012, this metric has grown by more than 300,000x (an 18-month doubling period would yield only a 12x increase). Improvements in compute have been a key component of AI progress, so as long as this trend continues, it’s worth preparing for the implications of systems far outside today’s capabilities.” Read More
Using the ‘What-If Tool’ to investigate Machine Learning models.
In this era of explainable and interpretable Machine Learning, one merely cannot be content with simply training the model and obtaining predictions from it. To be able to really make an impact and obtain good results, we should also be able to probe and investigate our models. Apart from that, algorithmic fairness constraints and bias should also be clearly kept in mind before going ahead with the model.
Investigating a model requires asking a lot of questions and one needs to have an acumen of a detective to probe and look for issues and inconsistencies within the models. Also, such a task is usually complex requiring to write a lot of custom code. Fortunately, the What-If Tool has been created to address this issue making it easier for a broad set of people to examine, evaluate, and debug ML systems easily and accurately. Read More
Beware of Geeks Bearing AI Gifts
Last March, McDonald’s Corp. acquired the startup Dynamic Yield for $300 million, in the hope of employing machine learning to personalize customer experience. In the age of artificial intelligence, this was a no-brainer for McDonald’s, since Dynamic Yield is widely recognized for its AI-poweredtechnology and recently even landed a spot in a prestigious list of top AI startups. Neural McNetworks are upon us.
Trouble is, Dynamic Yield’s platform has nothing to do with AI, according to an article posted on Medium last month by the company’s former head of content, Mike Mallazzo. It was a heartfelt takedown of phony AI, which was itself taken down by the author but remains engraved in the collective memory of the internet. Mr. Mallazzo made the case that marketers, investors, pundits, journalists and technologists are all in on an AI scam. The definition of AI, he writes, is so “jumbled that any application of the term becomes defensible.” Read More
Runway ML puts AI tools in the hands of creators everywhere
Machine learning can be a fantastic tool for creators, but integrating AI into your workflow is a challenge for those who can’t code. A new program called Runway ML aims to make this process easier by providing artists, designers, filmmakers, and others with an “app store” of machine learning applications that can be activated with a few clicks.
Say you’re an animator on a budget who wants to turn a video of a human actor into a 3D model. Instead of hiring expensive motion capture equipment, you could use Runway to apply a neural network called “PosetNet” to your footage, creating wireframe models of your actor that can then be exported for animation. Read More
a16z Podcast: Beyond Software, to Talent and Culture
with Marc Andreessen (@pmarca), Ben Horowitz (@bhorowitz), and Tyler Cowen (@tylercowen)
Continuing our 10-year anniversary series since the founding of Andreessen Horowitz (aka “a16z”), we’re resurfacing some of our previous episodes featuring Andreessen Horowitz founders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. Read More
Inside the West’s failed fight against China’s ‘Cloud Hopper’ hackers
Hacked by suspected Chinese cyber spies five times from 2014 to 2017, security staff at Swedish telecoms equipment giant Ericsson had taken to naming their response efforts after different types of wine.
Pinot Noir began in September 2016. After successfully repelling a wave of attacks a year earlier, Ericsson discovered the intruders were back. And this time, the company’s cybersecurity team could see exactly how they got in: through a connection to information-technology services supplier Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
Teams of hackers connected to the Chinese Ministry of State Security had penetrated HPE’s cloud computing service and used it as a launchpad to attack customers, plundering reams of corporate and government secrets for years in what U.S. prosecutors say was an effort to boost Chinese economic interests. Read More
Rick's Cafe AI 