TheSequence Scope: Microsoft's AI Week

Initially published as 'This Week in AI', a newsletter about the AI news, and the latest developments in ML research and technology

May 24, 2020

From the Editor: Microsoft's AI Week

Microsoft has been one of the technology companies most actively driving research and innovation in artificial intelligence(AI). This week, during the virtual edition of its Build conference, Microsoft announced an incredible number of AI initiatives across many of its product lines. The overarching theme of the releases is to support the implementation of large-scale and secured AI applications.

In the current state of the AI market, we are seeing a clear trend towards the implementation of larger models that require significant computation resources to operate. Those models have very unique training and security requirements which makes it very hard for mainstream companies to implement and operate. Some of Microsoft’s releases this week are intending to make “large-scale AI” more mainstream.

Now let’s take a look at the core developments in AI research and technology this week.

AI Research:

Facebook GrokNet

Facebook AI Research (FAIR) published a paper unveiling GrokNet, a new computer vision model designed to optimized shopping experiences.

Unsupervised NLP

Researchers from Amazon published a paper introducing the concept of language-independent tokenization as a way to train natural language tokenizer using unannotated data.

Google BIT

Google AI researchers published a paper unveiling BiT, a method for large-scale pretraining of computer vision models.

Cool AI TechReleases:

AGI Supercomputer

Microsoft and OpenAI unveiled a new supercomputer designed specifically for training large AI models.

The image credit: Microsoft AI blog

Zero-2

Microsoft Research open-sourced Zero-2, a new version of its memory optimization framework for the training of large scale models.

White Noise

Microsoft also open-sourced White Noise, a new differential privacy framework that can be used to protect datasets in machine learning workflows.

AI in the Real World:

MIT AI vs COVID-19

The MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab has been actively funding several AI projects focused on the COFIV-19 pandemic.

Nvidia Monster Quarter

In an uncertain financial market, Nvidia reported a $3.08 billion revenue quarter driven by its GPU sales used to power AI solutions.

AI for Industrial Control Systems

Microsoft announced Project Bonsai, a new service to create AI models for industrial control systems.

“This Week in AI” is a newsletter curated by industry insiders and the Invector Labs team, every week it brings you the latest developments in AI research and technology.

From July 14th the newsletter will change its name and format to develop ideas of systematic AI education.

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