Natural language processing (NLP) is among the most exciting subsets of machine learning. It lets us talk to computers like they’re people and vice versa. Siri, Google Translate, and the helpful chat bot on your bank’s website are all powered by this kind of AI — but not all NLP systems are created equal. In today’s AI landscape, smaller, targeted models trained on essential data are often better for business endeavors. However, there are massive NLP systems capable of incredible feats of communication. Called ‘large language models‘ (LLMs), these are capable of answering plain language queries, and generating novel text.
The European quantum computing sector might be the most exciting field in tech. Funding is at an all-time high and the number of quantum startups is increasing year over year. Yet the global media tends to portray the EU and UK as potential runners up in the supposed quantum computing race. In order to understand Europe’s position in the global quantum computing market we need to roll the clock back a couple years. Investors and entrepreneurs began flocking to quantum during the COVID-19 tech boom and, despite the expected post-pandemic drop off, analysts are predicting a massive increase in market size over the next 5-15 years.
My cravings for meat are well-known to regular readers (hi mum!). But as a self-righteous vegetarian, I refuse to dine on murdered animals. Those beliefs are now being challenged by a heretic: cultivated meat. Cultivated meat, also known as cultured meat, brings the farm to the lab. Cells are collected from an animal, grown in vitro, and then shaped into familiar forms of edible flesh. Greetings, humanoids Subscribe to our newsletter now for a weekly recap of our favorite AI stories in your inbox. Industry advocates proffer myriad benefits — and needs. According to the UN, around 80 billion animals are slaughtered each year for meat.
Content provided by IBM and TNW. When Hurricane Harvey struck southeast Texas in 2017, it caused $125 billion in economic damages. A recent assessment of local businesses in the area found that 90% lost revenue in the five figure range due to employee disruptions, lower customer demand, utility outages, and/or supply chain issues. Those that suffered property damage experienced compounded losses with parts of the business being shuttered for weeks and months at a time until repairs could be made. Since 2017 there’s been an average of 17.8 weather/climate disaster events per year in the US alone.
A UK scale-up this week unveiled an industry-first approach to identity verification: asking users to turn their heads. Onfido, an Oxford University spin-out, launched the software amid surging identity fraud. Growing economic pressures, increasing digitization, and pandemic-fuelled upheaval recently led politicians to warn that a “fraud epidemic” is sweeping across Onfido’s home country of the UK. Similar developments have been observed around the world. In the US, for instance, around 49 million consumers fell victim to identity fraud in 2020 — costing them a total of around $56 billion.
Content provided by IBM and TNW. Babies learn to talk from hearing other humans — mostly their parents — repeatedly produce sounds. Slowly, through repetition and discovering patterns, infants start connecting those sounds to meaning. Through a lot of practice, they eventually manage to produce similar sounds that humans around them can understand. Machine learning algorithms work much in the same way, but instead of having a couple of parents to copy from, they use data, painstakingly categorized by thousands of humans who have to manually review the data and tell the machine what it means.
Content provided by IBM and TNW. Today’s AI systems are quickly evolving to become humans’ new best friend. We now have AIs that can concoct award-winning whiskey, write poetry, and help doctors perform extremely precise surgical operations. But one thing they can’t do — which is, on the surface, far simpler than all those other things — is use common sense. Common sense is different from intelligence in that it is usually something innate and natural to humans that helps them navigate daily life, and cannot really be taught. In 1906, philosopher G. K. Chesterton wrote that “common sense is a wild thing, savage, and beyond rules.
It’s a bold new world for automobile makers. After a century of development and fine-tuning, the combustion engine is going the way of the dodos as Europe shifts to clean energy. But there’s more to the future of cars than just electric motors. The onset of fully autonomous vehicles may lie just beyond the technological horizon and the promise of a million-mile battery draws ever closer. In order to navigate the road to these technologies, European automakers are partnering with quantum computing companies at an increasing pace. The European automobile industry has a long, rich history of technological innovation.
Vinyl has undergone one hell of a renaissance. In 2006, the format was effectively dead. But since then? Vinyl records have experienced year-on-year growth, with the US alone clocking 41.7m units sold in 2021, a 45-fold increase from 16 years ago. While in Germany, sales went from 0.3m in 2006, to 4.5m last year. Those numbers are somewhat misleading though — and their exuberance hides a darker story. Vinyl sales are strong, but the industry itself is at breaking point. From rising costs to a huge printing backlog, from mainstream label dominance to environmental concerns, and from material shortages to outdated equipment, records are being held together by a shoestring.
