Last Week in AI

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**Last Week in AI**

Weekly summaries of the AI news that matters!

Latest Episodes:

#90 - AI for Algorithms, Chemical Weapons, Zelenskyy Deepfake, Border Control Mar 24, 2022

Show notes

Our 90th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!

Outline:

(00:00) Intro
Applications & Business
- (1:10) Machine Learning Reimagines the Building Blocks of Computing
- (5:50) Meet ElliQ, the robot who wants to keep Grandma company
- (10:52) Lightning Round
Research & Advancements
- (12:24) AI suggested 40,000 new possible chemical weapons in just six hours
- (14:15) Meta AI’s Sparse All-MLP Model Doubles Training Efficiency Compared to Transformers
- (16:15) Lightning Round
Society & Ethics
- (17:33) AI and disinformation in the Russia-Ukraine war + Deepfake Zelenskyy surrender video is the 'first intentionally used' in Ukraine war
- (19:28) Powered by artificial intelligence, ‘autonomous’ border towers test Democrats’ support for surveillance technology
- (23:15) Lightning round
Fun & Neat
- (25:05) AI-generated utopias
- (26:51) Building games and apps entirely through natural language using OpenAI’s code-davinci model
(29:15) Outro

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Deepfakes for Politicians, AI Propaganda, Operation Safety Net, Understanding Pigs Mar 17, 2022

Show notes

Our 89th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!

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Outline:

(00:00) Intro
Applications & Business
- (3:23) Amazon Uses Machine Learning to Improve Video Quality on Prime Video
- (6:55) These Campaigns Hope 'Deepfake' Candidates Help Get Out the Vote
Research & Advancements
- (16:25) DeepMind’s new AI model helps decipher, date, and locate ancient inscriptions
- (20:45) Generating and Identifying Propaganda With Machine Learning
Society & Ethics
- (27:08) The secret police: Cops built a shadowy surveillance machine in Minnesota after George Floyd's murder
- (33:40) AI-produced images can't fix diversity issues in dermatology databases
Fun & Neat
- (40:35) Grunt of the litter: scientists use AI to decode pig calls
- (43:25) I fell in love with my AI girlfriend - and it saved my marriage'
(48:00) Outro

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

AI-Developed Drug, AI Beats Moore’s Law, Russia’s AI Army, Baidu’s Robotaxis Mar 10, 2022

Show notes

Our 88th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!

Subscribe: RSS | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube

Outline:

(00:00) Intro
Applications & Business
- (01:18) How GitHub Uses Machine Learning to Extend Vulnerability Code Scanning
- (06:55) First Wholly AI-Developed Drug Enters Phase 1 Trials
Research & Advancements
- (10:50) Stanford University use AI computing to cut DNA sequencing down to five hours
- (15:36) AI Machines Have Beaten Moore's Law Over The Last Decade, Say Computer Scientists
Society & Ethics
- (21:56) China Is About to Regulate AI—and the World Is Watching
- (28:00) Russia’s AI Army: Drones, AI-Guided Missiles and Autonomous Tanks
Fun & Neat
(46:01) Outro

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

AI flirts, controls a fusion reactor, unmasks Q, draws Pokémon Feb 24, 2022

Show notes

Our 87th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!

Subscribe: RSS | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube

Outline:

(00:00) Intro
(01:30) AI Arrives for Serious Photo Editing, Not Just Smartphone Snapshots
(05:20) Listen to an AI voice actor try and flirt with you
(10:28) DeepMind’s AI can control superheated plasma inside a fusion reactor
(15:55) Good News About the Carbon Footprint of Machine Learning Training
(21:36) Who Is Behind QAnon? Linguistic Detectives Find Fingerprints
(26:18) Facial recognition firm Clearview AI tells investors it is seeking massive expansion beyond law enforcement
(31:23) This AI Generates Fake New Pokémon, And It's Actually Pretty Good
(34:01) AI generated this moody, entertaining animated music video
(37:35) Outro

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

AI for Ancient Languages, Eye Tracking for Ads, Pulpy AI Sci Fi Covers Feb 17, 2022

Show notes

Our 86th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!

Subscribe: RSS | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube

Outline:

(00:00) Intro
(01:22) This AI is set to help stop illegal fishing
(04:21) An ancient language has defied translation for 100 years. Can AI crack the code?
(09:40) The New CGI: Creating Neural Neighborhoods With Block-NeRF
(12:45) MuZero’s first step from research into the real world
(16:40) MoviePass 2.0 Wants to Track Your Eyeballs to Make Sure You Watch Ads
(20:02) AI fails its job interview
(23:58) Mad Scientist Forces AI to Make Horrific Pictures Out of BuzzFeed Headlines
(26:18) Artist uses AI to perfectly fake 70s science fiction pulp covers – artwork and titles

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

IBM Watson’s and ZIllow’s AI Failures, DeepMind’s Alphacode, GPT-NeoX-20B, AI Valentine’s Cards Feb 10, 2022

Show notes

Our 85th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!

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Outline:

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

OpenAI’s InstructGPT, Meta’s New AI Supercomputer, China Regulates DeepFakes, AI Playes Tetris Feb 06, 2022

Show notes

Our 84rd episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!

Note: apologies for issues with sound quality in this episode!

Outline:

Applications & Business
- Meta Aims to Build the World's Fastest AI Supercomputer
- Deploying machine learning to improve mental health
Research & Advancements
- OpenAI rolls out new text-generating models that it claims are less toxic
- Meta researchers build an AI that learns equally well from visual, written or spoken materials
Society & Ethics
- China Proposes Increased Regulation of Deepfakes and Other AI Synthesis Systems
- IRS Will Require Facial Recognition Scans to Access Your Taxes
Fun & Neat
- Google AI tools bring back women in science to the fore
- Watch an AI Play the Best Game of Tetris You've Ever Seen

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See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

AI for Omicron, Self-Farming Farms, AI-designed beer, Cuddly AI Jan 22, 2022

Show notes

Our 83rd episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!

Outline:

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Feel free to email us your thoughts or feedback at contact@lastweekin.ai

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Looking Back at AI in 2021 with Jeremie from Towards Data Science Jan 06, 2022

Show notes

For our first episode in 2022, we are joined with our friends from the Towards Data Science podcast to discuss our thoughts about the AI-related trends and events that happened in 2021.

Some things we discuss are:

Foundation models continue to grow, but one interesting trend is the focus on efficiency along with (instead of?) scale. For example, while DeepMind’s Gopher model has fewer than twice the parameters of GPT-3, it’s reportedly 25 times more efficient, meaning that much more value is being squeezed out of the same training data and compute. AI21Labs’ Jurrassic models are also equal to GPT-3 on a parameter count basis, but reflect a focus on architecture optimization over raw scaling that we expect to persist into 2022. (That’s not to say significant scaling won’t happen, or that it hasn’t happened already; Microsoft Turing-NLG, released a few months ago, is over half a trillion parameters in size. But it’s safe to say that scaling won’t be done without simultaneous efficiency optimizations that were less of a focus in late-2020.)
Procedural environment generation has been a big theme in reinforcement learning. In Open-Ended Learning Leads to Generally Capable Agents, the team at DeepMind showed how training RL agents on a wide range of environments can lead to emergent behaviour associated with generalization, like trial and error and cooperation with friendly agents.
Open-ended learning (OEL) seems like an interesting wildcard, which some researchers think might be an important ingredient in the final AGI recipe. We spoke with OpenAI’s head of open-ended learning, Ken Stanley, about what role OEL might play in the future of AI on this episode of the TDS podcast.
A NeurIPS spotlight paper titled Optimal Policies Tend to Seek Power, and subsequent work by the same author, are showing that we should expect highly capable AI systems to engage in dangerous behaviour that’s misaligned with human values, by default. Specifically, highly competent agents will tend to search for states that are powerful, in the sense that they offer many downstream options. This finding makes a compelling case that AI alignment ought to be prioritized, particularly given the rate of progress we’re seeing in AI capabilities more broadly. If it really is the case that capable AI systems will be dangerous by default, active effort must be invested in safety research.

Outline:

0:00 Intro
2:15 Rise of multi-modal models
7:40 Growth of hardware and compute
13:20 Reinforcement learning
20:45 Open-ended learning
26:15 Power seeking paper
32:30 Safety and assumptions
35:20 Intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation
42:00 Mapping natural language
46:20 Timnit Gebru’s research institute
49:20 Wrap-up

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Create AI art with an app, an AI-powered game platform, the year of monster AI models, better images of AI Jan 01, 2022

Show notes

Happy new year!

Our last episode of 2021 is also our 82th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!

Outline:

Subscribe: RSS | iTunes | Spotify | YouTube

Feel free to email us your thoughts or feedback at contact@lastweekinai.com

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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