AI with AI

OpenAI has trained an unsupervised language model that can perform basic reading comprehension, summarize text, answer questions, and generate coherent paragraphs; as Andy and Dave discuss, the bigger news came from OpenAI's decision to release a less-capable version of the GPT-2 model, "for the good of humanity," as one news site claimed. IBM's Project Debater lost a debate with champion debater Harish Natarajan, but more of the audience said Project Debater better enriched their knowledge on the topic. Princeton and Microsoft announce NAIL, an agent for playing general interactive fiction (such as the Zork series), and consisting of multiple Decision Modules for performing various tasks. Columbia University takes a step toward reconstructing speech directly from the brain's auditory cortex, by temporarily placing electrodes in patients and having them listen to spoken numbers. DARPA announces SAIL-ON, the Science of Artificial Intelligence and Learning for Open-world Novelty, in an attempt to help AI adapt to constantly changing conditions. DARPA's Systematizing Confidence in Open Research and Evidence (SCORE) promises $7.6M to the Center for Open Science, for leading the charge on reproducibility. The Animal-AI Olympics hopes to create a survival-of-the-fittest for AI approach to the animal kingdom. Facebook releases ELF OpenGo, an open-source implementation of DeepMind's AlphaZero. Neuroscientists from Case Western Reserve discover an entirely new form of neural communication that works through electrical fields and can function over gaps in severed tissues. The Nufffield Foundation and the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence released a report on the Ethical and Societal Implications of Algorithms, Data, and AI. Technology for Global Security and the Center for Global Security and Research join forces to understand and manage risks to international security and warfare, as posed by AI-related tech. A short review in Science looks at brain circuitry and learning, and Andy pulls DeepMind's look at Neuroscience-inspired AI paper from 2017. Research examines engineering-based design methodology for embedding ethics in autonomous robots, while another paper assesses the local interpretability of machine learning methods. Jeff Erickson releases a textbook on Algorithms; Daniel Shiffman publishes The Nature of Code; and Jason Brownlee offers up Clever Algorithms – Nature-Inspired Programming Recipes. A video from This Week in Machine Learning and AI dissects the controversy surrounding OpenAI's GPT-2 model. And finally, two websites offer up faces of fictional people.