Daily Archives: July 21, 2021
Enabling the ‘imagination’ of artificial intelligence
A team of researchers at USC is helping AI imagine the unseen, a technique that could also lead to fairer AI, new medicines and increased autonomous vehicle safety.
…as humans, it’s easy to envision an object with different attributes. But, despite advances in deep neural networks that match or surpass human performance in certain tasks, computers still struggle with the very human skill of “imagination.” Read More
OpenAI disbands its robotics research team
OpenAI has disbanded its robotics team after years of research into machines that can learn to perform tasks like solving a Rubik’s Cube. Company cofounder Wojciech Zaremba quietly revealed on a podcast hosted by startup Weights & Biases that OpenAI has shifted its focus to other domains, where data is more readily available.
“So it turns out that we can make a gigantic progress whenever we have access to data. And I kept all of our machinery unsupervised, [using] reinforcement learning — [it] work[s] extremely well. There [are] actually plenty of domains that are very, very rich with data. And ultimately that was holding us back in terms of robotics,” Zaremba said. “The decision [to disband the robotics team] was quite hard for me. But I got the realization some time ago that actually, that’s for the best from the perspective of the company.” Read More
What could make AI conscious? with Wojciech Zaremba, co-founder of OpenAI
The Computer Scientist Training AI to Think With Analogies
Melanie Mitchell has worked on digital minds for decades. She says they’ll never truly be like ours until they can make analogies.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning book Gödel, Escher, Bach inspired legions of computer scientists in 1979, but few were as inspired as Melanie Mitchell. After reading the 777-page tome, Mitchell, a high school math teacher in New York, decided she “needed to be” in artificial intelligence. She soon tracked down the book’s author, AI researcher Douglas Hofstadter, and talked him into giving her an internship. She had only taken a handful of computer science courses at the time, but he seemed impressed with her chutzpah and unconcerned about her academic credentials.
Mitchell prepared a “last-minute” graduate school application and joined Hofstadter’s new lab at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The two spent the next six years collaborating closely on Copycat, a computer program which, in the words of its co-creators, was designed to “discover insightful analogies, and to do so in a psychologically realistic way.” Read More
New toolkit aims to help teams create responsible human-AI experiences
Microsoft has released the Human-AI eXperience (HAX) Toolkit, a set of practical tools to help teams strategically create and responsibly implement best practices when creating artificial intelligence technologies that interact with people.
The toolkit comes as AI-infused products and services, such as virtual assistants, route planners, autocomplete, recommendations and reminders, are becoming increasingly popular and useful for many people. But these applications have the potential to do things that aren’t helpful, like misunderstand a voice command or misinterpret an image. In some cases, AI systems can demonstrate disruptive behaviors or even cause harm. Read More
Rick's Cafe AI 