Data, and more specifically using data, is not a new concept, but it remains an elusive one. It comes with terms like “the internet of things” (IoT) and “the cloud,” and no matter how often those are explained, smart people can still be confused. And then there’s the amount of information available and the speed…
Many scholars, analysts, and other observers have suggested that resistance to innovation is an Achilles’ heel of authoritarian regimes. Such governments can fail to keep up with technological changes that help their opponents; they may also, by stifling rights, inhibit innovative economic activity and weaken the long-term condition of the country. But a new study…
Biology is a wondrous yet delicate tapestry. At the heart is DNA, the master weaver that encodes proteins, responsible for orchestrating the many biological functions that sustain life within the human body. However, our body is akin to a finely tuned instrument, susceptible to losing its harmony. After all, we’re faced with an ever-changing and…
Bill Gates has joined the chorus of big names in tech who have weighed in on the question of risk around artificial intelligence. The TL;DR? He’s not too worried, we’ve been here before. The optimism is refreshing after weeks of doomsaying—but it comes with few fresh ideas. The billionaire business magnate and philanthropist made his…
Posted by Amir Yazdanbakhsh, Research Scientist, and Vijay Janapa Reddi, Visiting Researcher, Google Research Computer Architecture research has a long history of developing simulators and tools to evaluate and shape the design of computer systems. For example, the SimpleScalar simulator was introduced in the late 1990s and allowed researchers to explore various microarchitectural ideas. Computer…
There’s a lot of angst about software developers “losing their jobs” to AI, being replaced by a more intelligent version of ChatGPT, GitHub’s Copilot, Google’s Codey, or something similar. Matt Welsh has been talking and writing about the end of programming as such. He’s asking whether large language models eliminate programming as we know it,…
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Walking to a friend’s house or browsing the aisles of a grocery store might feel like simple tasks, but they in fact require sophisticated capabilities. That’s because humans are able to effortlessly understand their surroundings and detect complex information about patterns, objects, and their own location in the environment. What if robots could perceive their…
Posted by Malaya Jules, Program Manager, Google This week, the 61st annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), a premier conference covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language, is taking place online. As a leader in natural language processing and understanding, and a Diamond…
Figure 1: stepwise behavior in self-supervised learning. When training common SSL algorithms, we find that the loss descends in a stepwise fashion (top left) and the learned embeddings iteratively increase in dimensionality (bottom left). Direct visualization of embeddings (right; top three PCA directions shown) confirms that embeddings are initially collapsed to a point, which then…