Google today announced the first cohort in its Google for Startups Accelerator: Voice AI, a 10-week program designed to pair startups with experts to help tackle product development, machine learning, and other technical challenges. The 12 companies selected will gain access to resources across Google’s programs and products, Google says, as well as to its […]
Disrupting tech hiring: How AI connects companies to talent
Presented by Hiretual Software’s dominance over our lives has accelerated in ways we may not have imagined before. Household names like Amazon, Google, Tesla, and Netflix have solidified technology’s unparalleled impact on consumer sentiment across different markets. More recently, some of the biggest IPOs of 2020 include companies, like DoorDash, AirBnB, Robinhood, and Snowflake, who […]
IBM proposes AI chip with benchmark-beating power efficiency
IBM claims to have developed one of the world’s first energy-efficient chips for AI inferencing and training built with 7-nanometer technology. In a paper presented at the 2021 International Solid-State Circuits Virtual Conference in early February, a team of researchers at the company detailed a hardware accelerator that supports a range of model types while […]
Thought-detection: AI has infiltrated our last bastion of privacy
Our thoughts are private – or at least they were. New breakthroughs in neuroscience and artificial intelligence are changing that assumption, while at the same time inviting new questions around ethics, privacy, and the horizons of brain/computer interaction. Research published last week from Queen Mary University in London describes an application of a deep neural […]
AI Weekly: Techno-utopianism in the workplace and the threat of excessive automation
Every so often, VentureBeat writes a story about something that needs to go away. A few years back, my colleague Blair Hanley Frank argued that AI systems like Einstein, Sensei, and Watson must go because corporations tend to overpromise results for their products and services. I’ve also taken runs at charlatan AI and white supremacy. This […]
Superb AI raises $9.3 million to annotate training data
San Mateo, California-based Superb AI, a startup developing a platform for AI-enabled training data, today announced that it closed a $9.3 million financing round. Cofounder and CEO Hyunsoo Kim said that the financing will allow the three-year-old company to ramp up hiring and scale customer adoption as well as expand and accelerate product development. Training […]
Forget user experience. AI must focus on ‘citizen experience’
Tech giants and their AI-powered digital platforms and solutions can affect the destinies of world leaders, nation states, multinational corporations, global stock market, and individuals alike. The creators of major digital platforms as well as the designers and developers of ubiquitous AI systems treat individuals as mere users, customers, or data points, oftentimes completely ignoring […]
Google targets AI ethics lead Margaret Mitchell after firing Timnit Gebru
Google has revoked Ethical AI team leader Margaret “Meg” Mitchell’s employee privileges and is currently investigating her activity, according to a statement provided by a company spokesperson. Should Google fire Mitchell, it will mean the company has effectively chosen to behead its own AI ethics team in under two months. In an interview with VentureBeat […]
AI Weekly: The future of tech policy after an attempted coup
On Wednesday, we witnessed a coup attempt fueled by racism, disinformation, and the President of the United States. Video of the U.S. Capitol breach shows that Trump supporters were permitted to violate multiple federal laws, desecrate the people’s house, undermine national security, and violently oppose the largest exercise of the right to vote since the […]
Uber researchers propose AI language model that emphasizes positive and polite responses
AI-powered assistants like Siri, Cortana, Alexa, and Google Assistant are pervasive. But for these assistants to engage users and help them to achieve their goals, they need to exhibit appropriate social behavior and provide informative replies. Studies show that users respond better to social language in the sense that they’re more responsive and likelier to […]