I guess by now we have all heard of the very controversial Google Duplex demonstration at Google I/O 2018, where a human-voice synthesized bot called several local businesses and was able to interact with humans who had no idea they were talking to a machine. Many of us are fascinated by the technological progress that could be witnessed. A part of me was fascinated just like that. But to me the real fascinating discussion is about ethics, specifically AI ethics that come along with approaches like Duplex. Continue reading “What is the key learning from Google Duplex? Digital Responsibility needed more than ever before…”
Google CEO Sundar Pichai today announced that the company’s speech recognition technology has now achieved a 4.9 percent word error rate. Put another way, Google transcribes every 20th word incorrectly. That’s a big improvement from the 23 percent the company saw in 2013 and the 8 percent it shared two years ago at I/O 2015.
The tidbit was revealed at Google’s I/O 2017 developer conference, where a big emphasis is on artificial intelligence. Deep learning, a type of AI, is used to achieve accurate image recognition and speech recognition. The method involves ingesting lots of data to train systems called neural networks, and then feeding new data to those systems in an attempt to make predictions…
Jesse Engel is playing an instrument that’s somewhere between a clavichord and a Hammond organ—18th-century classical crossed with 20th-century rhythm and blues. Then he drags a marker across his laptop screen. Suddenly, the instrument is somewhere else between a clavichord and a Hammond. Before, it was, say, 15 percent clavichord. Now it’s closer to 75 percent. Then he drags the marker back and forth as quickly as he can, careening though all the sounds between these two very different instruments. “This is not like playing the two at the same time,” says one of Engel’s colleagues, Cinjon Resnick, from across the room. And that’s worth saying. The machine and its software aren’t layering the sounds of a clavichord atop those of a Hammond. They’re producing entirely new sounds using the mathematical characteristics of the notes that emerge…
via Google’s AI Invents Sounds Humans Have Never Heard Before | WIRED
At first, Fan Hui thought the move was rather odd. But then he saw its beauty. “It’s not a human move. I’ve never seen a human play this move,” he says. “So beautiful.”
It’s a word he keeps repeating. Beautiful. Beautiful. Beautiful.The move was the 37th in the second game of the historic Go match between Lee Sedol, one of the world’s top players, and AlphaGo, an artificially intelligent computing system built by researchers at Google. Inside the towering Four Seasons hotel in downtown Seoul, the game was approaching the end of its first hour when AlphaGo instructed its human assistant to place a black stone in a largely open area on the right-hand side of the 19-by-19 grid that defines this ancient game. And just about everyone was shocked…
Source: The Sadness and Beauty of Watching Google’s AI Play Go | WIRED
Let a thousand virtual worlds rain down from the clouds. Or rather, the cloud. That’s the call from Google as it gets behind a tiny British startup called Improbable. Founded by two Cambridge graduates and backed by $20 million in funding from the venture capitalists at Andreessen Horowitz, Improbable offers a new way of building virtual worlds, including not just immersive games à la Second Life or World of Warcraft, but also vast digital simulations of real cities, economies, and biological systems. The idea is that these virtual worlds can run in a holistic way across a practically infinite network of computers, so that they can expand to unprecedented sizes and reach new levels of complexity…
Source: Google’s Improbable Deal to Recreate the Real World in VR | WIRED
After a couple years of being driven primarily by the startups, the virtual reality industry is growing to be one increasingly dominated by the big dogs.There’s still a sizable amount of fragmentation in the industry as well a high chance of failure for many of the efforts currently being undertaken. For these reasons some of the biggest names in the industry, Google, HTC, Oculus, Samsung, Sony and Acer have joined forces to create the Global Virtual Reality Association (GVRA) which aims to “unlock and maximize VR’s potential,” but its really not clear what this all means for consumers…
Source: Google, HTC, Oculus, Samsung, Sony join forces to create Global VR Association | TechCrunch
Neural networks are machines and algorithms developed to behave like the human brain—but a development from Google Translate shows that (once again) AI can outperform humans in a big way. Google’s AI can now translate language pairs it has not been trained for. To be clear, this means that it can translate between languages that it wasn’t taught to translate. This works if the AI first translates both of the languages into a common language that it knows…
Source: Google’s AI Can Now Translate Between Languages It Wasn’t Taught to Translate Between
Google Brain has created two artificial intelligences that evolved their own cryptographic algorithm to protect their messages from a third AI, which was trying to evolve its own method to crack the AI-generated crypto. The study was a success: the first two AIs learnt how to communicate securely from scratch.
The Google Brain team (which is based out in Mountain View and is separate from Deep Mind in London) started with three fairly vanilla neural networks called Alice, Bob, and Eve. Each neural network was given a very specific goal…
Source: Google AI invents its own cryptographic algorithm; no one knows how it works | Ars Technica UK
ANDRÉ CRAMER 
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