AI in 2016: a dozen highlights
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March: AlphaGo combines deep reinforcement learning with deep neural networks to beat the best human player of the board game Go. [Article]
April: Nvidia unveils a “supercomputer for AI and deep learning”. With a price tag of $129k, it delivers 170 teraflops, and is 12 times more powerful than the company’s 2015 offering. Nvidia’s share price continues its skyward trajectory. [Article]
April: Researchers from Microsoft and several Dutch institutions create a new Rembrandt. Not a copy of an existing picture, but a new image in the exact style of the master, 3-D printed to replicate his brush-strokes. [Article]
September: DeepMind unveils WaveNet, a convoluted neural net which produces the most realistic computer-generated speech achieved to date. [Article]
September: Google unveils an image captioning system that achieves 93.9% accuracy on the ImageNet classification task, and makes it available as an open source model in its Tensor Flow software library. [Article]
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September: Google, Facebook, Amazon, IBM and Microsoft join forces to create the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society, an organisation intended to facilitate collaboration and ensure transparency and safety. [Article]
September: Uber launches trials of self-driving taxis in Pittsburgh, open to the public. [Article] It was beaten to the punch by NuTonomy, a much smaller company in Singapore. [Article] A month later, a self-driving truck operated by Otto, a group of ex-Googlers acquired by Uber, delivers 50,000 beers from a brewery to a customer 120 miles away. [Article]
September: The Economic Singularity is published, with encouraging reviews.
