Sophisticated natural language processing systems like OpenAI’s GPT-2 can craft speech that’s impressively humanlike, but those same AI often struggle with cogencY and coherency. In particular, they don’t pen compelling conclusions — AI-generated story endings tend to be generic and lacking in context. This shortcoming motivated scientists at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science […]
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Does evolutionary computation ring a bell? In computer science, it’s the family of algorithms for global optimization inspired by biological evolution. Instead of following explicit mathematical gradients, these special models generate variants, test them, and retain the top performers. They’ve shown promise in early work by OpenAI, Google, and others, but they’re somewhat tough to […]
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Slack today announced it’s deploying an under-the-hood upgrade for its desktop app to boost performance for companies and teams using the app for workplace collaboration. The latest version of Slack for desktop and internet browsers is due out in the coming weeks and promises a 33% faster launch time, 10 times faster launch of VoIP […]
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The information retrieval models underpinning search engines require reams of manually annotated data, if they’re trained using machine learning. That’s because they must handle not only a range of queries, but any and all data tangential to these queries. Fortunately, an approach (“Content-Based Weak Supervision for Ad-Hoc Re-Ranking”) detailed by scientists at Amazon’s Alexa division […]
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Last year during its Max 2018 conference in Los Angeles, Adobe took the wraps off a new version of Adobe XD with enhancements on the voice assistant design front and tighter integration with the company’s broader Creative Cloud suite. Building on this groundwork, the San Jose company today unveiled the Amazon Alexa XD plugin, which […]
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Microsoft today announced that it would invest $1 billion in OpenAI, the San Francisco-based AI research firm cofounded by CTO Greg Brockman, chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, Elon Musk, and others, with backing from luminaries like LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman and former Y Combinator president Sam Altman. In a blog post, Brockman said the investment will […]
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Sennder, a platform and marketplace that connects commercial shippers with smaller freight carriers, has raised $70 million in a series C round of funding led by Lakestar, with participation from Accel, HV Holtzbrinck Ventures, Project A, Siemens’ Next47, H14, and Scania Growth Capital. Founded out of Berlin in 2016, Sennder touts itself as a “digital road […]
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VentureBeat is seeking a leader to curate content for our expanding events focused on artificial intelligence. This Head of Events Content will report directly to the CEO and will oversee speaker recruitment and content planning for VentureBeat’s portfolio of events, most notably Transform — the leading event for business executives seeing to understand and implement […]
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Today people all around the world will be celebrating the 50th anniversary of one of humanity’s greatest technological achievements: landing on the Moon. Technology has undergone immense change since 1969. The computer systems and software that took Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins to our nearest celestial neighbor pale in comparison to the smartphones […]
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On Tuesday, Oakland became the third U.S. city after San Francisco and the Boston suburb of Somerville to ban facial recognition use by local government departments, including its police force. The ordinance adopted by the city council, which was written by Oakland’s Privacy Advisory Commission and sponsored by Councilmember Rebecca Kaplan, prohibits the city and […]
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Sony might not be a smartphone hitmaker like rivals Samsung, Google, or LG (at least in the U.S.), but it’s nothing if not persistent. The company’s latest attempt to nab a market foothold is the Xperia 1, which was announced in February at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Among its spotlight features are an ultrawide […]
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Perhaps you’ve heard of FaceApp, the mobile app that taps AI to transform selfies, or This Person Does Not Exist, which surfaces computer-generated photos of fictional people. But what about an algorithm whose videos are wholly novel? One of the newest papers from Google parent company Alphabet’s DeepMind (Efficient Video Generation on Complex Datasets) details […]
Read More“If your competitors are applying AI, and they’re finding insight that allow them to accelerate, they’re going to peel away really, really quickly,” says Deborah Leff, Global Leader and Industry CTO for Data Science and AI at IBM, on stage at Transform 2019. On their panel, “What the heck does it even mean to ‘Do […]
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Germany’s FlixMobility has reportedly raised a $531 million venture capital round that values the company at more than $2 billion. The company issued a press release today announcing it had raised a large funding round, though it declined to reveal the amount. However, sources told Reuters that it was $531 million, easily the largest for […]
Read MoreTransform 2019: Accelerating Your Business with AI was VentureBeat’s largest and most expansive event to date. Over the course of two days on July 10 and 11, leaders from both the tech giants and disruptive startups came together to share the opportunities and challenges in an AI-first world. The program included keynotes from the main […]
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Royal Carribean’s Spectrum of The Seas — the third-largest class of cruise ship in the world by gross tonnage — can accommodate over 6,000 people and 2,500 crewmembers during its nine-night Asia voyages. That’s a lot of mouths to feed, particularly mornings prior to port, when throngs of passengers nab breakfast before deboarding. So how […]
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Sussing out water potability is sometimes nigh impossible in the field, depending on the remoteness of the region from where it was sourced. The United Nations estimates that every day, two million tons of sewage and industrial and agricultural waste are discharged into the world’s water supply, and while a range of chemical kits test […]
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There’s no shortage of fitness apps that promise to tone your muscles and boost your baseline heart rate in no time, but a new challenger on the block claims its approach is more holistic than most. San Francisco-based Pivot, which today emerged from stealth with $17 million in series A funding led by DCM with […]
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As wireless networks and mobile CPUs become faster, the speed of the RAM used in portable devices can actually become a performance bottleneck, preventing them from processing data at peak speeds. Samsung is doing its part today to accelerate the performance of next-generation mobile devices, as it announced that it has started mass production of […]
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(Reuters) — U.S. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer called on the FBI and the Federal Trade Commission to conduct a national security and privacy investigation into FaceApp, a face-editing photo app developed in Russia, in a letter sent on Wednesday. The viral smartphone application, which has seen a new surge of popularity due to a […]
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