AI with AI

Andy and Dave discuss the latest in AI news, including a report that the Israel Defense Forces used a swarm of small drones in mid-May in Gaza to locate, identify, and attack Hamas militants, using Thor, a 9-kilogram quadrotor drone. A paper in the Journal of American Medical Association examines an early warning system for sepsis and finds that it misses out on most instances (67%) of cases, and frequently issued false alarms (to which the developer contests the results). A new bill, the Consumer Safety Technology Act, directs the US Consumer Product Safety Commission to run a pilot program to use AI to help in safety inspections. A survey from FICO on The State of Responsible AI (2021) shows, among other things, a disinterest in the ethical and responsible use of AI among business leaders (with 65% of companies saying that can’t explain how specific AI model predictions are made, and 22% of companies have an AI ethics board to consider questions on AI ethics and fairness). In a similar vein, a survey from the Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center found that 68% of respondents (from across 602 leaders in the AI field) believe that AI ethical principles will NOT be employed by most AI systems within the next decade; the survey includes a summary of the respondents’ worries and hopes, as well as some additional commentary. GitHub partners with OpenAI to launch CoPilot, a “Programming Partner” that uses contextual cues to suggest new code. Researchers from Stanford University, UC San Diego, and MIT research Physician, a visual and physical prediction benchmark to measure predictions about commonplace real-world physical events (such as when objects: collide, drop, roll, domino, etc). CSET releases a report on Machine Learning and Cybersecurity: Hype and Reality, finding that it is unlikely that machine learning will fundamentally transform cyber-defense. Bengio, Lecun, and Hinton join together to pen a white paper on the role of deep learning in AI, not surprisingly eschewing the need for symbolic systems. Aston Zhang and Zack C. Lipton, and Alex J Smola release the latest version of Dive into Deep Learning, now over 1000 pages, and living only as an online version.