To receive The Algorithm in your inbox every Monday, sign up here. Welcome to The Algorithm! Let me introduce you to Philip Nitschke, also known as “Dr. Death” or “the Elon Musk of assisted suicide.” Nitschke has a curious goal: He wants to “demedicalize” death and make assisted suicide as unassisted as possible through technology. As…
Posted by Yi Tay and Mostafa Dehghani, Research Scientists, Google Research, Brain Team Building models that understand and generate natural language well is one the grand goals of machine learning (ML) research and has a direct impact on building smart systems for everyday applications. Improving the quality of language models is a key target for…
Posted by Ashish Thapliyal, Software Engineer, and Jordi Pont-Tuset, Research Scientist, Google Research Image captioning is the machine learning task of automatically generating a fluent natural language description for a given image. This task is important for improving accessibility for visually impaired users and is a core task in multimodal research encompassing both vision and…
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….