Focus AI, the latest AI news in just 3 minutes.
Edition #86 - January 14th 2022
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🧑🎤 Boomy: The AI software that could turn you in to a music star
You can do things such as add or strip-out instruments, change the tempo, adjust the volumes, add echoes, make everything sound brighter or softer, and lay down some vocals. The Boomy website and app even allows people to submit their tracks to be listed on Spotify and other music streaming sites, and to earn money every time they get played.
🦠🔬 BioNTech has developed a method to predict new high-risk variants of COVID-19: Early Warning System (EWS)
EWS combines spike protein structural modeling with AI algorithms to quickly flag potential high-risk COVID-19 variants. It could evaluate new variants within minutes, with the system identifying over 90 percent of the World Health Organization’s designated variants, including variants of concern, interest and variants under monitoring, on average two months in advance.
🔮 Lessons learned when building open GPT-3
BigScience, an initiative to train a GPT-3-scale model on a public supercomputer, is currently trying to train a 104B model. Training models at this scale is something of an artisanal science, with lots of researchers working from hard-won rules of thumb in-tandem with things like scaling laws. Here's a nice 'lessons learned' writeup from BigScience on the challenges it has faced in training, 13B and 104B-scale models so far.
🧬 Artificial intelligence predicts RNA and DNA binding sites to speed up drug discovery
This AI uses data on the structure of RNA or DNA molecules to identify sites on them where interaction with potential drug candidates can occur. That allows pharmaceutical companies to discover new medications—including antiviral agents. The new solution is also more accurate than prior approaches, because it accounts for how the shape assumed by a nucleic acid molecule affects which binding sites are exposed.
🌻 Why smaller can be smarter for real-world AI
When 1 million parameters can beat 100 million parameters, for quality control on solar panels.
The past few years of AI has been distinguished by the 'bigger is better' phenomenon, as companies develop ever-larger models that consumer ever-larger amounts of compute and data. Now, a paper from researchers with Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany reminds us that bigger isn't always better - especially when it comes to real-world, applied AI. In this paper, they compare different approaches to building an image classifier that can spot defects in solar panels.
🇨🇳 China’s New AI Governance Initiatives Shouldn’t Be Ignored
China might do more ambitious tech regulations than the West. Here's a nice summary from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace about what three prominent Chinese policy organizations are doing with regard to AI governance.
🔫 Stopping Guns at the Gate
A system called Hexwave will look for firearms, knives, and explosives carried by baseball fans who visit Camden Yards, home field of the Baltimore Orioles, The Baltimore Sun reported. The system will be tested during certain games in the coming baseball season.
How it works: Developed by MIT Lincoln Lab and licensed to Liberty Defense Holdings, a security firm, Hexwave scans passing bodies and alerts guards to potential threats even if they’re concealed by clothing or luggage. It can scan 1,000 people per hour.
📦 Amazon: AI Versus the Garbage Heap
Amazon reported long-term success using machine learning to shrink its environmental footprint. The online retailer developed a system that fuses product descriptions, images, and structured data to decide how an item should be packed for shipping. It evolved over six years, ultimately helping Amazon cut packaging waste equivalent to over 2 billion shipping boxes. The system initially made packaging decisions based on text descriptions. Last year, the company integrated computer vision and tabular data analysis.
#Amazon #China #GPT3 #Guns #LessIsMore #Boomy
A big thanks to our sources: https://jack-clark.net/, https://www.actuia.com/, https://thevariable.com/news/, https://techcrunch.com/, https://read.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/
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Have a good week-end,
Verónica 🐕 , Maxime 🙃 from Toulouse, France with 🌺