An engineer has built something that is sure to be the envy of any self-respecting Lego fan: an AI-powered Lego sorting machine. Daniel West, a software engineer from Australia, built the device, which is also made out of Lego, of course, over two years. The impressive gizmo stands about 80 centimetres tall, contains over 10, …

re:InventAmazon Web Services has made Inf1, its cloud instance for running machine-learning software on its custom-designed AI chip Inferentia, available to all. AWS CEO Andy Jassy announced the service on Tuesday during the internet goliath's annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. Inf1 is available as an EC2 instance, where …

US Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Cory Booker (D-NJ) are examining how federal agencies and healthcare companies are tackling algorithmic biases – after a recent study found that black patients were less likely to be referred to care programs by software than white patients, despite being sicker. On Tuesday, Wyden (D-OR) and …

re:InventAmazon is releasing DeepComposer, a software package to help machine learning enthusiasts automatically generate jingles using a mini keyboard. The announcement was made by Matt Wood, VP of AI at AWS, during Amazon’s annual re:Invent developer conference in Las Vegas. “Everyone has access to the type of expertise that allows …

Google has announced a new Explainable AI feature for its cloud platform, which provides more information about the features that cause an AI prediction to come up with its results. Artificial neural networks, which are used by many of today's machine learning and AI systems, are modelled to some extent on biological brains. …

RoundupWelcome to an early edition of this week's AI news summary, brought forward as some of us are away for Thanksgiving... How ML algorithms power a surveillance state in Xinjiang: We don't need the long-promised artificial general intelligence in order for the technology to pose a threat to human lives. Just look at what's …

Book reviewEveryday AI has the approximate intelligence of an earthworm, according to Janelle Shane, a research scientist at the University of Colorado but better known as an AI blogger. Since AI is both complicated and massively hyped, and therefore widely misunderstood, her new book is a useful corrective. You Look Like a Thing and I …

RoundupIf you can't get enough of machine learning news then here's a roundup of extra tidbits to keep your addiction ticking away. Read on to learn more about how DeepMind is helping Google's Play Store, and a new virtual environment to train agents safely from OpenAI. An AI recommendation system for the Google Play Store: Deepmind …

For many of us, assembling IKEA furniture is proof that while Scandinavians are no longer vikings, they can still ruin your day. But, curse no longer at your Kullaberg or Västanby or whatever the fsck it's called now: a bunch of smart folks in America have developed robots that use machine-learning algorithms to construct IKEA …

RoundupHere's this week's collection of AI-related news that we found interesting. Read on to find out more about a new chip coming to Microsoft Azure and how Twitter hopes to deal with deepfakes. Graphcore ML chips coming to Microsoft Azure: Graphcore, a British AI hardware startup, is teaming up with Microsoft to bring its …

In a bizarre experiment, researchers recorded the brain activity of mice staring at images and used the data to help make computer vision models more robust against adversarial attacks. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) used for object recognition in images are all susceptible to adversarial examples. These inputs have been …

RoundupHello, welcome to this week's roundup of AI news. Read on for a fun and, frankly worrying, quiz that tests if you can tell if something was made up by an AI text generation model or said by Trump, and more. AI computation from 1959 - 2018: OpenAI has analysed the amount of computing power needed to build AI systems in research …

Machine learning algorithms can predict when and where lightning will strike, according to new research published in npj Climate and Atmospheric Science. That might sound impressive at first, but the study is still pretty crude considering its limits. The forecast can only guess that a thunderbolt will flash somewhere within a …

Machine-learning algorithms might be able to work out if your brain is turning to mush from end-stage liver disease just by reading your emails, according to preliminary experiments. ESLD, also known as chronic liver failure, slowly progresses over months and years. It’s often caused by cirrhosis, where scar tissue in damaged …

IgniteGot governance? Microsoft reckons there is room for improvement – it should know – and has used its Ignite Florida knees-up to batter compliance with its overused AI stick. Are you... compliant? Protecting data is a challenge. Microsoft 365 customers can already slap classifications and labels on documents to control which …

Microsoft researchers have built a chatbot from OpenAI’s text-generating model GPT-2, and trained it on millions of conversations scraped from... oh crap. Reddit. Teaching software to talk using chatter lifted from internet forums, such as Reddit, is risky. What can start out as an innocent discussion can quickly descend into …

OpenAI’s massive text-generating language model, which was whispered to be too dangerous to release, has finally been published in full after the research lab concluded it has “seen no strong evidence of misuse so far.” The model, known as GPT-2, was announced back in February. At the time, only a partial version of the …

The self-driving Uber car that hit and killed a woman walking her bike across a street wasn’t designed to detect “jaywalking pedestrians.” That's according to an official dossier published by the US National Safety Transportation Board (NTSB) on Tuesday. The March 2018 accident was the first recorded death by a fully …