Jun 1, 2018
In breaking news, Andy and Dave discuss a few cracks seem to be appearing in Google’s Duplex demonstration; more examples of the breaking of Moore’s Law; a Princeton effort to advance the dialogue on AI and ethics; India joins the global AI-sabre-rattling; the UK Ministry of Defence launches an AI hub/lab; and the U.S. Navy dissolves its secretary-level unmanned systems office. Andy and Dave then discuss a demonstration of “zero-shot” learning, by which a robot learns to do a task by watching a human perform it once. The work reminds Andy of the early natural language “virtual block world” SHRDLU, from the 1970s. In other news, the research team that designed Libratus (a world-class poker-playing AI) announced they had developed a better AI that, more importantly, is also computationally orders of magnitude less expensive (using a 4-core CPU with 16 GB of memory). Next, research with Intel and the University of Illinois UC has developed a convolutional neural net to significantly improve low-ISO image quality while shooting at faster shutter speeds; Andy and Dave both found the results for improving low-light images to be quite stunning. Finally, after yet-another-round of a generative adversarial example (in which Dave predicts the creation of a new field), Andy closes with some recommendations on papers, books, and videos, including Galatea 2.2 and The Space of Possible Minds.