François Chollet, an influential AI researcher, is launching a new startup that aims to build frontier AI systems with novel designs. The startup, Ndea, will consist of an AI research and science lab. It’s looking to “develop and operationalize” AGI. AGI, which stands for “artificial general intelligence,” typically refers to AI that can perform any […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only ..read more

One of the most widely used techniques to make AI models more efficient, quantization, has limits — and the industry could be fast approaching them. In the context of AI, quantization refers to lowering the number of bits — the smallest units a computer can process — needed to represent information. Consider this analogy: When […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only ..read more

One of the most widely used techniques to make AI models more efficient, quantization, has limits — and the industry could be fast approaching them. In the context of AI, quantization refers to lowering the number of bits — the smallest units a computer can process — needed to represent information. Consider this analogy: When […] © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only ..read more

Watermarking an image to mark is one’s own is something that has value across countless domains, but these days it’s more difficult than just adding a logo in the corner. Steg.AI lets creators embed a nearly invisible watermark using deep learning, defying the usual “resize and resave” countermeasures. Ownership of digital assets has had a complex few years, what with NFTs and AI generation shaking up what was a fairly low-intensity field before. If you really need to prove the provenance of a piece of media, there have been ways of encoding that data into images or audio, but these tend to be ..read more

Remember Natural Language Processing? NLP arose several years ago but it was only in 2018 that AI researchers proved it was possible to train a neural network once on a large amount of data and use it again and again for different tasks. In 2019 GPT-2 from Open AI, and T5 by Google appeared, showing that they were startlingly good (it’s now been incorporated into Google Duplex, pictured). Concerns were even raised about their possible misuse. But since then, things have gone, well, pretty exponential. 
 2021 saw a veritable’ Cambrian explosion’ of NLP Start-ups and Large Language Models. This ..read more

Who will be liable for harmful speech generated by large language models? As advanced AIs such as OpenAI’s GPT-3 are being cheered for impressive breakthroughs in natural language processing and generation — and all sorts of (productive) applications for the tech are envisaged from slicker copywriting to more capable customer service chatbots — the risks of such powerful text-generating tools inadvertently automating abuse and spreading smears can’t be ignored. Nor can the risk of bad actors intentionally weaponizing the tech to spread chaos, scale harm and watch the world burn. Indeed, OpenAI ..read more

Eric Landau Contributor Before Eric Landau co-founded Encord, he spent nearly a decade at DRW, where he was lead quantitative researcher on a global equity delta one desk and put thousands of models into production. He holds an S.M. in Applied Physics from Harvard University, an M.S. in Electrical Engineering and a B.S. in Physics from Stanford University. In 2015, the launch of YOLO — a high-performing computer vision model that could produce predictions for real-time object detection — started an avalanche of progress that sped up computer vision’s jump from research to market. It’s since ..read more

Arrikto’s mission is to enable data scientists to build and deploy their machine learning models faster. The company, which raised a $10 million Series A round in late 2020, is building its platform on top of Kubeflow, a cloud-native open source project for building machine learning operations that was originally developed by Google but which is now mostly managed by the community. Until now, Arrikto’s main product was a self-managed enterprise distribution of Kubeflow for enterprises (aptly named “Enterprise Kubeflow”) that wanted to run it in their data centers or virtual private clouds. Tod ..read more

Training neural networks takes a lot of time, even with the fastest and costliest accelerators on the market. It’s maybe no surprise then that a number of startups are looking at how to speed up the process at the software level and remove some of the current bottlenecks in the training process. For Strong Compute, a Sydney, Australia-based startup that was recently accepted into Y Combinator’s Winter ’22 class, it’s all about removing these inefficiencies in the training process. By doing so, the team argues that it can speed up the training process by 100x or more. “PyTorch is beautiful and ..read more

Amazon rules the roost when it comes to e-commerce, not just because of its size but because of how it uses that to amass large amounts information that it in turn uses to continue feeding the machine with sophisticated product recommendations, relevant advertising, and more to keep people finding things to buy, and buying them. Today, a Stockholm-based startup called Depict.ai that has also built a product recommendation tool — which it believes can help any retailer sell like Amazon — is announcing funding of $17 million to feed its own growth in the U.S. an Europe, after picking up 60 custo ..read more