Nov 06, 2019

At the BlizzCon gaming convention last weekend, players of the strategy game StarCraft II stood in line to get walloped by DeepMind’s AI. After training for the better part of a year, the bot has become one of the world’s top players.

Generative networks can embroider sentences into stories and melodies into full-fledged arrangements. A new model does something similar with drawings.

The UK’s banking industry is using AI in many facets of the business. A survey of financial firms in the UK found that nearly two-thirds of respondents have deployed machine learning technology. Many said they expect their use to double in the next two years.

Amazon, watch your back. There’s a new player in the book business and, unlike Jeff Bezos, it doesn’t need eight hours of sleep a night. The online bookstore Booksby.ai is run entirely by AI. Neural networks write the books, create the cover art, price the merchandise, even write the reviews.

Robots designed to assist people with disabilities have become more capable, but they’ve also become harder to control. New research offers a way to operate such complex mechanical systems more intuitively.

Building AI systems is hard. Despite all the hype, AI engineers struggle with difficult problems every day. For the next few weeks, I’ll explore some of the major challenges. Today’s topic: The challenge of building AI systems that are robust to real-world conditions.

Building AI systems is hard. Despite all the hype, AI engineers struggle with difficult problems every day. For the next few weeks, I’ll explore some of the major challenges. Today’s topic: The challenge of building AI systems that are robust to real-world conditions.