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Last Week in AI

by Jesus RodriguezJuly 29th, 2019

Too Long; Didn't Read

The investments in artificial intelligence(AI) are regularly achieving new highs but this week has been unprecedented. Microsoft announced an investment of $1 billion in AI research powerhouse OpenAI. SoftBank announced it’s second Vision Fund with a specific focus on AI. Uber released a new version of Ludwig, its no-code deep learning toolbox that includes integration with Comet.ml. The gig economy is also impacting AI. How workers can earn money by helping train AI systems. How to earn money from the gig economy.

Every week, my team at Invector Labs publishes a newsletter to track the most recent developments in AI research and technology. You can find this week’s issue below. You can sign up for it using this link. Please do so, our guys worked really hard on this.

From the Editor: A Multi-Billion Week in AI

The investments in artificial intelligence(AI) are regularly achieving new highs but this week has been unprecedented. We started the week with Microsoft announcing an investment of $1 billion in AI research powerhouse OpenAI. The partnership will give Microsoft access to one of the most exclusive talent pools in the AI ecosystem in order to take the first steps towards the development of artificial general intelligence(AGI) technologies.

The second major development of the week was SoftBank’s announcement of its second Vision Fund. This time backed by $108 billion, the fund will have a special focus on AI. Microsoft and Apple are notable investors in this new edition of the Vision Fund which is likely to disrupt the venture capital ecosystem even more than its predecessor.

Now let’s take a look at the core developments in AI research and technology this week:

AI Research

Autonomous cars are some of the most complex AI systems ever created and its training is extremely challenging. DeepMind and Waymo have partnered to use evolutionary techniques to better train self-driving cars.

Question-Answer systems are one of the areas of AI that is likely to see a lot of adoption in the near future. Microsoft Research published a paper about a machine comprehension method that can answer questions in very specialized documents.

Continuing with question-answer techniques, the Facebook AI Research team(FAIR) published a paper proposing a technique that can articulate long form answers to a given question.

Cool AI Tech Releases

Uber released a new version of Ludwig, its no-code deep learning toolbox that includes integration with Comet.ml.

Microsoft Research released MS GEN Encoder, a new AI API to understand the intent of search queries.

Engineers from LinkedIn published a slide deck and reference architecture to enable fairness, transparency and privacy in large scale AI solutions.

AI in the Real World

Microsoft invests $1 billion in Open AI to accelerate the path to general artificial intelligence.

SoftBank just announced it’s second Vision Fund with a specific focus on AI. Microsoft is one of the newest limited partners in the new fund which decreases its reliance on Saudis investments.

The gig economy is also impacting AI. How workers can earn money by helping train AI systems.