Posted by Samier Merchant, Google Research, and Nal Kalchbrenner, Google DeepMind Forecasting weather variables such as precipitation, temperature, and wind is key to numerous aspects of society, from daily planning and transportation to energy production. As we continue to see more extreme weather events such as floods, droughts, and heat waves, accurate forecasts can be…
It’s a stormy holiday weekend, and you’ve just received the last notification you want in the busiest travel week of the year: the first leg of your flight is significantly delayed. You might expect this means you’ll be sitting on hold with airline customer service for half an hour. But this time, the process looks…
This time of year, everyone publishes predictions. They’re fun, but I don’t find them a good source of insight into what’s happening in technology. Instead of predictions, I’d prefer to look at questions: what are the questions to which I’d like answers as 2023 draws to a close? What are the unknowns that will shape…
This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. This week everyone is talking about AI. The White House just unveiled a new executive order that aims to promote safe, secure, and trustworthy AI systems. It’s the most far-reaching bit…
Disclaimer: Based on the announcement of the EO, without having seen the full text. While I am heartened to hear that the Executive Order on AI uses the Defense Production Act to compel disclosure of various data from the development of large AI models, these disclosures do not go far enough. The EO seems to…
Tracking a Big Mac hamburger’s journey from ranch to fast-food restaurant isn’t easy. Today’s highly segmented beef supply chain consists of a wide array of ranches, feedlots, packers, processors, distribution centers, and restaurants, each with its own set of carefully collected data. Yet in today’s complex digital world, organizations need more visibility than ever to…
This is an excerpt from Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines by Joy Buolamwini, published on October 31 by Random House. It has been lightly edited. The term “x-risk” is used as a shorthand for the hypothetical existential risk posed by AI. While my research supports the…
To make our way through the world, our brain must develop an intuitive understanding of the physical world around us, which we then use to interpret sensory information coming into the brain. How does the brain develop that intuitive understanding? Many scientists believe that it may use a process similar to what’s known as “self-supervised…
With the proliferation of computationally intensive machine-learning applications, such as chatbots that perform real-time language translation, device manufacturers often incorporate specialized hardware components to rapidly move and process the massive amounts of data these systems demand. Choosing the best design for these components, known as deep neural network accelerators, is challenging because they can have…
Researchers from MIT and NVIDIA have developed two techniques that accelerate the processing of sparse tensors, a type of data structure that’s used for high-performance computing tasks. The complementary techniques could result in significant improvements to the performance and energy-efficiency of systems like the massive machine-learning models that drive generative artificial intelligence. Tensors are data…