Many research papers
Dec 16, 2020

The Batch: New Coronavirus Treatments, Reimagining Robotaxis, Opening Historical Archives, Streamlining Simulations

When a researcher works for a company, what rights should they have to publish their work, and what rights should the company that sponsored the work have? This issue has come up many times in the AI community across many companies...
Brass weight scales with cupped trays
Dec 09, 2020

The Batch: Autonomous Helium Balloons, Seeing Eye AI, Muppet Models Estimate Weights and Measures, Labor Unions Fight Automation

Like many people in the AI community, I am saddened by the sudden departure from Google of ethical AI researcher Timnit Gebru. Timnit is a tireless champion of diversity and fairness in AI.
Light bulb on
Dec 02, 2020

The Batch: Intelligent Agent Vs. Fighter Pilot, GAN for Pajama Zooming, When AI Goes Wrong, Multimodal Learning for Medicine

The rise of AI creates opportunities for new startups that can move humanity forward. In the 1990s, the internet was embraced successfully by incumbent companies including Apple and Microsoft, but it also inspired hugely impactful...
Labeling training data charts
Nov 25, 2020

The Batch: Government AI Falls Short, Face Recognition for Bears, Research Papers in One Sentence, Counting Crowds

Over the last two weeks, I described the importance of clean, consistent labels and how to use human-level performance (HLP) to trigger a review of whether labeling instructions need to be reviewed.
Detecting system pointing out scratches on a surface
Nov 18, 2020

The Batch: Bias In Surprising Places, Retail Models Adjust to Covid, Faster Transformers, AI Patents Explode

Last week, I wrote about the limitation of using human-level performance (HLP) as a metric to beat in machine learning applications for manufacturing and other fields. In this letter, I would like to show why beating HLP isn’t always the best way to improve performance.
Different defects on a platform
Nov 11, 2020

The Batch: AI Predicts the Vote, Face Recognition Looks for Criminals, Model Cow Makes Milk, Transformers Prove Theorems

Beating human-level performance (HLP) has been a goal of academic research in machine learning from speech recognition to X-ray diagnosis. When your model outperforms humans, you can argue that you’ve reached a significant milestone and publish a paper!
Santa Clara County's I Voted sticker
Nov 04, 2020

The Batch: Turning Tables on Face Recognition, Testing GPT-3, Recognizing Disinformation, Detecting Deepfakes

As I write this letter, the vote count is underway in yesterday’s U.S. presidential election. The race has turned out to be tight. In their final forecast last night, the political analysts at fivethirtyeight.com suggested an 89 percent chance that Joe Biden would win.
Illustration of a Halloween pumpking on a book
Oct 28, 2020

The Batch: Halloween Special! Skeletons in the AI Closet including Bias, Disinformation, Rivalries, Power-Hungry Models, Black Boxes

Welcome to this special Halloween issue of The Batch! In AI, we use many challenging technical terms. To help you keep things straight, I would like to offer some definitions that I definitely would not use.
LandingLens platform
Oct 21, 2020

The Batch: AI Researchers Under Fire, RL Agents in Danger, Bias in Synthetic Data, One Neuron to Rule Them All

Today Landing AI, where I am CEO, launched LandingLens, an AI-powered platform that helps manufacturers develop computer vision solutions that can identify defective products.
Andrew Ng's father Ronald Ng playing the violin
Oct 14, 2020

The Batch: Mapping Wildfires, Compressing Video, Humanizing Benchmarks, Training GANs on Small Datasets, Documenting Government AI

My father recently celebrated a milestone: He has completed 146 online courses since 2012. His studies have spanned topics from creative writing to complexity theory. Ronald Ng is a great example of lifelong learning.
Balance with the word "present" down and the word "future" up
Oct 07, 2020

The Batch: Deepfakes Against Oppression, Alexa Hears With Her Eyes, New Medical AI Standards, Action Recognition With a Twist

There’s a lot we don’t know about the future: When will a Covid-19 vaccine be available? Who will win the next election? Or in a business context, how many customers will we have next year?
Online panel discussion on “GANs for Good” with Andrew Ng, Anima Anandkumar, Alexei Efros, Ian Goodfellow, and Sharon Zhou
Sep 30, 2020

The Batch: GAN Special Issue! Ian Goodfellow For Real, Detecting Fakes, Including Minorities, Synthesizing Training Data

This special issue of The Batch celebrates the launch of our new Generative Adversarial Networks Specialization! GANs are among the most exciting technologies to emerge from deep learning. These networks learn in a very different way than typical supervised methods...
Dishwasher robot placing a plate
Sep 23, 2020

The Batch: YouTube vs. Conspiracy Theorists, Robots That Think Ahead, GPU + CPU = The Future, Transformers Retooled

AI researchers keep coming up with impressive innovations: transformer-based language models, self-supervised learning, deep reinforcement learning, small data. All of these developments hold great promise.
Man riding a bike and reading a book at the same time
Sep 16, 2020

The Batch: Training 1 Trillion Parameters, Medical AI Gets a Shot in the Arm, Does Bert Have Common Sense?, Revitalizing Chess

I’d like to share a programming tip that I’ve used for years. A large part of programming involves googling for code snippets you need on Stack Overflow and other websites. (Shh. Don’t tell the nondevelopers. ????)
Hawaiian Pizza
Sep 09, 2020

The Batch: Data for Defense, Predicting Credit Approvals, More Learning From Fewer Labels, Hunting for Planets

Today we take it for granted that many people know how to read and write. Someday, I hope, it will be just as common that people know how to write code. Several hundred years ago, society didn’t view language literacy as a necessary skill.

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