In a workshop in Rotterdam in the Netherlands, Philip Nitschke—“Dr. Death” or “the Elon Musk of assisted suicide” to some—is overseeing the last few rounds of testing on his new Sarco machine before shipping it to Switzerland, where he says its first user is waiting. This is the third prototype that Nitschke’s nonprofit, Exit International, has…
Many organizations have adopted machine learning (ML) in a piecemeal fashion, building or buying ad hoc models, algorithms, tools, or services to accomplish specific goals. This approach was necessary as companies learned about the capabilities of ML and as the technology matured, but it also has created a hodge-podge of siloed, manual, and nonstandardized processes…
Gartner has anointed “Hyperautomation” one of the top 10 trends for 2022. Should it be? Is it a real trend, or just a collection of buzzwords? As a trend, it’s not performing well on Google; it shows little long-term growth, if any, and gets nowhere near as many searches as terms like “Observability” and “Generative…
To receive The Algorithm in your inbox every Monday, sign up here. Welcome to the Algorithm! About damn time. That was the response from AI policy and ethics wonks to news last week that the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the White House’s science and technology advisory agency, had unveiled an AI Bill of Rights. The…
A new AI system can create natural-sounding speech and music after being prompted with a few seconds of audio. AudioLM, developed by Google researchers, generates audio that fits the style of the prompt, including complex sounds like piano music, or people speaking, in a way that is almost indistinguishable from the original recording. The technique…
Posted by Zalán Borsos, Research Software Engineer, and Neil Zeghidour, Research Scientist, Google Research Generating realistic audio requires modeling information represented at different scales. For example, just as music builds complex musical phrases from individual notes, speech combines temporally local structures, such as phonemes or syllables, into words and sentences. Creating well-structured and coherent audio…
I Was There When is an oral history project that’s part of the In Machines We Trust podcast. It features stories of how breakthroughs and watershed moments in artificial intelligence and computing happened, as told by the people who witnessed them. In this episode we meet one of the world’s greatest chess players, Garry Kasparov….
In recent years, scientists have made great strides in their ability to develop artificial intelligence algorithms that can analyze patient data and come up with new ways to diagnose disease or predict which treatments work best for different patients. The success of those algorithms depends on access to patient health data, which has been stripped…
The last five years have seen large innovations throughout drug development and clinical trial life cycles—from finding a target and designing the trial, to getting a drug approved and launching the drug itself. The recent use of mRNA vaccines to combat covid-19 is just one of many advances in biotech and drug development. Whether in…
DeepMind has used its board-game playing AI AlphaZero to discover a faster way to solve a fundamental math problem in computer science, beating a record that has stood for more than 50 years. The problem, matrix multiplication, is a crucial type of calculation at the heart of many different applications, from displaying images on a…