March: AlphaGo combines deep reinforcement learning with deep neural networks to beat the best human player of the board game Go. []
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. []
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. []
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. []
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. []
September: The Economic Singularity is published, with encouraging reviews. 🙂 [Link]
October: The White House reports that China now publishes more academic papers on AI than the US. European leaders don’t appear concerned that even collectively, they are very far behind. [Article]
November: Two months after it started using machine learning, Google announces that its Translate system has invented an intermediary language, interlingua, to enable it to translate between languages it had not been taught to translate. []
December: The inaugural AI-Europe conference in London attracts 50+ top speakers and 1,000+ attendees. [Link]
Next up (tomorrow), some forecasts for developments in AI during 2017.
