TheSequence Scope: Announcing The Sequence of AI Knowledge

The latest news about AI research and trends, and the reasons behind the expansion of This Week in AI newsletter to TheSequence Edge and TheSequence Scope

Jul 12, 2020

From the Editor: Announcing The Sequence of AI Knowledge

Today, we have a bit long editorial but it includes a cool announcement 😉 So please read on.

It’s been almost two years since we started This Week in AI at Invector Labs. During that time, our audience has grown to thousands of loyal readers. The original goal of the newsletter is to try to keep our audience up to date with the hottest developments in AI research and technology of the previous week. We try to not focus on the news but keep our attention on actual research and technology releases.

Building AI solutions at Invector Labs and receiving feedback to this newsletter, we noticed that the challenges for AI education are increasing. The volume of published AI research has more than quadrupled in recent years and high-quality open-source technology releases pop up every week. More importantly, the gap between AI research and practical implementations has been widening. Keeping up with that fast-growing ecosystem is really hard and feels overwhelming to developers and technology professionals wanting to get into space. You can take machine learning courses but those take a lot of time and, frankly, don’t address the challenges of keeping up with research and technology developments.

To contribute in a small way to address these challenges, we are going to be expanding this newsletter with a new offering.

We are expanding This Week in AI into two newsletters: TheSequence Edge and The Sequence Scope.

TheSequence Edge will be delivered to your inbox twice a week. In 5 minutes, this new newsletter will cover three key topics:

A machine learning concept you should learn (ex: Transformers, Auto-ML, meta-learning, etc.);

A summary of a research paper that has had an impact in the machine learning space;
A briefing on a new machine learning framework or platform.

TheSequence Edge will be a subscription offering of $5 per month. You can subscribe to it here. We offer different options for groups and companies. Please contact us at thesequence@substack.com. If you are a student or can’t afford the subscription but really need it – please, drop us a line with your story.

The Sequence Scope will be the new brand for This Week in AI newsletter and will continue bringing you a summary of the most important research, technology releases, and AI news of the week. You will continue receiving The Sequence Scope at no cost.

Just to be clear, we are expanding (not replacing) This Week in AI. We would love for you to join us in this experiment to bring AI education to your inbox 5 minutes at a time by subscribing to The Sequence Edge. But if you prefer not to, you will still receive The Sequence Scope every Sunday at no cost.

On Tuesday, July 14, we will send an example of TheSequence Edge to all our free subscribers.

Thanks for your support and loyalty throughout these months and I can’t wait to get your feedback about our next phase.

Now let’s check the pulse of the AI market.

Money in AI:

A deep-tech startup PQShield raised $7M in a seed round led by Kindred Capital, with the participation of Crane Venture Partners, Oxford Sciences Innovation, and various angel investors. In the pre-quantum world, the startup creates cryptographic solutions to secure make hardware, software, and communications systems unhackable for future quantum computers.
Bringing low-code AI to companies of all sizes, MonkeyLearn has raised $2.2 million in a round led by Uncork Capital and Bling Capital.
Aryballe, a startup developing biochemical sensors, optics, and AI to collect and analyze odor data, has raised €7 million ($7.9 million). Samsung Ventures and Groupe SEB’s Seb Alliance led the round, with contributions from existing investors Innovacom, Cemag Invest, Asahi Kasei, and HCVC.
Kernel, a startup building brain technology applicable to business scenarios, just announced a monster $53 million round raised from General Catalyst, Khosla Ventures, Eldridge, Manta Ray, Tiny Blue Dot.
Amazon is acquiring self-driving car startup Zoox for about $1.3 billion but, additionally, is planning to spend another $100 million in stock awards to retain the talent.

AI Research

New Approach to Reinforcement Learning

Google Research published a paper proposing a new reinforcement learning method that prevents agents to use rough approximations for their decisions.

Language Queries Over Tabular Data

Facebook AI Research published a paper proposing TaBERT, a transformer model to query tabular data using natural language.

AutoML-Zero

Google Research published a paper proposing AutoML-Zero, a method that can create entire machine learning models starting with high school math operations. We cover this paper at TheSequence.

Cool AI Tech Releases:

Azure Cognitive Services

Microsoft added a new group of services and capabilities to the Azure Cognitive Services stack.

Google Cloud Data QnA

Google Cloud released a new service to query petabytes of data in BigQuery using natural language.

Useful Tweets:

Last week in TheSequence Edge #1 and #2:

Last week in TheSequence Edge #1 we’ve covered Hyperparameters; discussed The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis that challenges the traditional principles of ML optimization; evaluated Weights and Biases, one of the top platforms in the market that enables the hyperparameter optimization of ML models. TheSequence Edge #2 was dedicated to AutoML, which as any overhyped topic is constantly subjected to misinterpretations. We covered the concept, spoke about AutoML-Zero, and explored the benefits of the Weights&Biases platform.

Regularly spending up to 5 minutes of your time with TheSequence reading about the most useful information about ML – you become steadily knowledgeable about important developments in the AI space.

To stay up-to-date and receive TheSequence Edge every Tuesday and Thursday, please consider to ➡️

We appreciate you. See you around in the AI world.

TheSequence