Executives at the social network have clashed over CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned data tool that revealed users’ high engagement levels with right-wing media sources.
One day in April, the people behind CrowdTangle, a data analytics tool owned by Facebook, learned that transparency had limits.
Brandon Silverman, CrowdTangle’s co-founder and chief executive, assembled dozens of employees on a video call to tell them that they were being broken up. CrowdTangle, which had been running quasi-independently inside Facebook since being acquired in 2016, was being moved under the social network’s integrity team, the group trying to rid the platform of misinformation and hate speech. Some CrowdTangle employees were being reassigned to other divisions, and Mr. Silverman would no longer be managing the team day to day.
The announcement, which left CrowdTangle’s employees in stunned silence, was the result of a yearlong battle among Facebook executives over data transparency, and how much the social network should reveal about its inner workings. Read More
Tag Archives: Big7
Google Built A Trillion Parameter AI Model. 7 Things You Should Know
One of the exciting things about Artificial Intelligence is the steady stream of new accomplishments that we see in the news. Every week, some research institution or company accomplishes something amazing with AI, whether it is translating a long lost language, or building a massive model, the scale of which has never been done before.
But what does it all mean? If I am a business CEO, what impact if any does this have on my business? Is there any way I can leverage it? If I am a teacher, what should I tell my students? Being aware of recent events is always a good thing, but without context it is hard to make sense of them.
In this article, we dissect this specific announcement, and answer seven high level questions you may have about it. Read More
Google News Initiative launches AI Academy for Small Newsrooms
The first pilot edition of the AI Academy for Small Newsrooms program will commence in September 2021 and will welcome journalists and developers from small news organizations in Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) region.
The Google News Initiative has partnered with Polis, the journalism think-tank of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), to launch the “AI Academy for Small Newsrooms” , a six-week-long, free online program for 20 media professionals to learn how artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to support their journalism.
The program combines a series of masterclasses given by experts working at the intersection of journalism and artificial intelligence with opportunities for discussion among participants. Read More
China’s Tencent Says It’ll Use Face Recognition to Keep Minors From Gaming at Night
henzhen, China-based gaming giant Tencent has announced it will use a face recognition system to prevent minors in its home country from playing video games late into the night.
Tencent is attempting to keep ahead of recent regulations designed to stamp out what the Chinese government defines as excessive and unhealthy gaming habits. In 2019, China passed a law ostensibly intended to prevent minors “from indulging in online games.” According to NPR, that includes a ban on minors playing video games from 10:00 p.m. to 8:00 a.m., as well as limiting their playtime to 90 minutes a day. The law also prohibited minors from spending more than $28 to $57 a month on micro-transactions. New rules requiring all individuals, regardless of age, to register for games using their real identities and prohibiting citizens from playing games that include “sexual explicitness, goriness, violence, and gambling” were also implemented. Read More
Amazon Fresh grocery store: Meet Just Walk Out shopping
For the first time, Just Walk Out technology is available in a new full-size Amazon Fresh grocery store.
Now customers can save time shopping for groceries by skipping the checkout line with the launch of our new Amazon Fresh grocery store with Just Walk Out shopping, now open in The Marketplace at Factoria in Bellevue, Washington.
Using a combination of overhead cameras equipped with computer vision to identify items customers put in their cart, weight-detecting sensors to log whenever they move items from or back to store shelves, and back-end systems to track the data and manage inventory, Amazon is proving out the scalability of the Amazon Fresh concept. Read More
AI Conference Recap: Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Others at ICLR 2021
At the recent International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), research teams from several tech companies, including Google, Microsoft, IBM, Facebook, and Amazon, presented nearly 250 papers out of a total of 860 on a wide variety of AI topics related to deep learning.
The conference was held online in early May and featured a “round-the-clock” program of live talks and Q&A sessions, in addition to pre-recorded videos for all accepted papers. Each day of the four-day conference featured two Invited Talks from leading deep-learning researchers. Although most of the papers were from academia, many prominent tech companies were well represented by their AI researchers: Google contributed over 100 papers, including several winning Outstanding Paper awards, Microsoft 53, IBM 35, Facebook 23, Salesforce 7, and Amazon 4. Read More
Apple’s Live Text is going to read all the text in all your photos with AI
Apple has announced a new feature called Live Text, which will digitize the text in all your photos. This unlocks a slew of handy functions, from turning handwritten notes into emails and messages to searching your camera roll for receipts or recipes you’ve photographed.
…Apple says the feature is enabled using “deep neural networks” and “on-device intelligence,” with the latter being the company’s preferred phrasing for machine learning. (It stresses Apple’s privacy-heavy approach to AI, which focuses on processing data on-device rather than sending it to the cloud. Read More
From conversation to code: Microsoft introduces its first product features powered by GPT-3
At its Build developers conference, Microsoft unveiled its first features in a customer product powered by GPT-3, the powerful natural language model developed by OpenAI, which will help users build apps without needing to know how to write computer code or formulas.
GPT-3 will be integrated in Microsoft Power Apps, the low code app development platform that helps everyone from people with little or no coding experience — so-called “citizen developers” — to professional developers with deep programming expertise build applications to improve business productivity or processes. Read More
High-performance speech recognition with no supervision at all
Whether it’s giving directions, answering questions, or carrying out requests, speech recognition makes life easier in countless ways. But today the technology is available for only a small fraction of the thousands of languages spoken around the globe. This is because high-quality systems need to be trained with large amounts of transcribed speech audio. This data simply isn’t available for every language, dialect, and speaking style. Transcribed recordings of English-language novels, for example, will do little to help machines learn to understand a Basque speaker ordering food off a menu or a Tagalog speaker giving a business presentation.
This is why we developed wav2vec Unsupervised (wav2vec-U), a way to build speech recognition systems that require no transcribed data at all. It rivals the performance of the best supervised models from only a few years ago, which were trained on nearly 1,000 hours of transcribed speech. We’ve tested wav2vec-U with languages such as Swahili and Tatar, which do not currently have high-quality speech recognition models available because they lack extensive collections of labeled training data.
Wav2vec-U is the result of years of Facebook AI’s work in speech recognition, self-supervised learning, and unsupervised machine translation. It is an important step toward building machines that can solve a wide range of tasks just by learning from their observations. We think this work will bring us closer to a world where speech technology is available for many more people. Read More
Google’s Cinematic Moments is like Apple’s Live Photos — but a lot creepier
Google Photos will see several new features later this year — but some could be a bit creepier than others.
Arriving this summer, Cinematic Moments is a Google Photos tool that yields similar results to Apple’s Live Photos. The difference is that Cinematic Moments uses artificial intelligence (AI) to fill in the gaps of a few photos, rather than record short video, to produce in-motion media.
With a handful of still images, Cinematic Moments can create a complete and animated action shot. It uses neural networks to synthesize the moment, materializing frames from thin air, practically. Read More
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