Focus AI - Edition #98
#Gato #Self-Driving #Moxi
Focus AI - The latest AI news in just 3 minutes.
Edition #98 - June 10th 2022
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This week, five articles :
🗞 AI Copy Writers
👮 Right-Sizing Confidence
😺 Gato: One Model, Hundreds of Tasks
👨⚕️ Nurse’s Mechanical Helper
🚕 Free Self-Driving taxi
Startups are helping writers tailor articles that appear near the top of Google’s search results. They use GPT-3, the language model from OpenAI, to generate headlines, product descriptions, blog posts... Google’s guidelines state that it may take action against automatically generated content.
However, a Google spokesperson told Wired that the company may take a more lenient approach toward generated text that has been designed to serve readers rather than manipulate search results.
An object detector trained exclusively on urban images might mistake a moose for a pedestrian and express high confidence in its poor judgment. New work enables object detectors, and potentially other neural networks, to lower their confidence when they encounter unfamiliar inputs.
Researchers at University of Wisconsin-Madison proposed Virtual Outlier Synthesis (VOS), a training method that synthesizes representations of outliers to make an object detector more robust to unusual examples. Given an image, an object detector generates two types of outputs: bounding boxes and classifications for those boxes. VOS adds a third: the model’s degree of certainty that the image is an outlier.
😺 Gato: One Model, Hundreds of Tasks
Researchers took a step toward achieving a longstanding goal: One model that performs a whole lot of very different tasks.
A team at DeepMind announced Gato, a model that performs over 600 diverse tasks including generating image captions, manipulating a physical robot arm, and playing Atari. The authors trained the 1.2 billion-parameter transformer on seven vision-language tasks like MS-COCO Captions, an image and joint-angle dataset of stacking blocks with a real robot, recorded state-of-the-art simulations of 595 tasks like ALE Atari, plus the language dataset MassiveText.
It's fascinating that Gato might generalize across different tasks. Specifically, the authors pretrained Gato, fine-tuned it on four new tasks, and showed that, in three cases, the fine-tuned model outperformed models trained specifically for those tasks.
We look forward to more research that evaluates the extent to which such networks, beyond memorizing various unrelated tasks, generalize across tasks and to new tasks. In other words, further progress in the direction indicated by the paper’s title: A Generalist Agent.
👨⚕️ Nurse’s Mechanical Helper
Hospitals are using robots to lighten the load on clinical staff. A number of U.S. hospitals are using Moxi, a robot from Diligent Robotics, to ferry supplies, lab specimens, soiled laundry, and other items, Wired reported.
Moxi is four feet tall with blinking L.E.D. eyes and an articulated arm tipped with a rubber grip. It navigates using a front-facing camera, rear-facing lidar, and auditory cues. A secure compartment that can be unlocked by a radio-frequency badge holds sensitive items such as lab samples. Fifteen Moxi robots are operating in U.S. hospitals, and another 60 are scheduled for deployment this year.
In Beijing, self-driving cars are rolling without a driver behind the wheel. What’s new: China’s capital city authorized Pony.ai and Apollo Go, a Baidu subsidiary, to deploy self-driving taxis without a human in the driver’s seat, Reuters reported.
An authorization issued last November had allowed the companies to operate in the same area with safety drivers. The robotaxis are restricted to a 23 square-mile zone in Beijing’s southeastern suburbs, home to roughly 300,000 residents. Rides are free, but both companies plan to charge in the near future.
#Gato #Self-Driving #Moxi
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 🌺