AI with AI
Episode 1.41: Mission SHRIMPossible
In breaking news, Andy and Dave discuss the “Future of Life” pledge that various AI tech leaders have signed, promising not to develop lethal autonomous weapons; DARPA announces its Artificial Intelligence Exploration (AIE) program, to provide “unique funding opportunities;” DARPA also announces a Short-Range Independent Microrobotic Platform (SHRIMP) program, which seeks to develop multi-functional tiny robots for use in natural and critical disaster scenarios; GoodAI announces the finalists in the “General AI Challenge,” which produced a series of conceptual papers; and a report from UK’s parliament examines the issues surrounding the government’s use of drones. Then in deeper topics, Andy and Dave discuss various attempts to use AI to predict the FIFA World Cup 2018 champion (all of which failed), which includes a discussion on the appropriate types of questions to which AI is amenable, and also includes an obligatory Star Trek reference. Baidu announced ClariNet, which performs text-to-speech synthesis within one neural network (as opposed to multiple networks).