TheSequence Scope: OpenAI Launches its First Product

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

Jun 14, 2020

From the Editor: OpenAI Launches its First Product

OpenAI has been at the center of some of the biggest advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) in recent years. Created by industry luminaries such as Elon Musk and Sam Altman, OpenAI started as a non-profit organization with a focus on advancing AI research. After Altman took over as CEO last year, OpenAI transitioned to a capped profit structure and attracted a $1 billion investment from Microsoft. The next step in the evolution of OpenAI seems to be to build up its commercial muscle and that’s what they seem to be doing.

Earlier this week, OpenAI unveiled an API product that exposes endpoints for some of its most successful language models including the controversial GPT-3. The API is available for Beta but already has drawn interest from big technology companies such as Google and Microsoft. The current offer is mostly focused on text-generation but we can expect it to expand from there. OpenAI’s step has been seen as a controversial move. Personally, I like the approach as it might allow startups to have access to the kind of AI models that only big corporate labs can create these days.

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

AI Research:

Summarizing Long Texts

Google Research published a paper introducing PEGASUS, a transformer-based model for text summarization.

AI Agents Playing Diplomacy

DeepMind published a paper proposing a method to allow reinforcement learning agents to develop cooperative skills by playing the Diplomacy game.

>Find more details in the research paper

Cross-Language Transfer Learning

Microsoft Researchers published a paper proposing a method for transfer knowledge across different languages.

Cool AI Tech Releases:

Uber Neuropod

Uber open sourced Neuropod, a framework that provides a common interface for executing deep learning models built using different frameworks.

OpenAI API

OpenAI launched its first commercial product, the OpenAI API provides programmatic access to the famous GPT-3 language generation model.

The image credit: OpenAI

Procgen and MineRL

OpenAI launched two competitions to improve reinforcement learning models.

AI in the Real World:

OpenAI Goes Commercial

OpenAI started like a non-profit but now it has started to commercialize its research to some of the biggest brands in tech.

Data Labeling Startup Raises $3 Million

SuperAnnotate, a startup that provides tools for labeling datasets, just announced a $3 million raise.

Amazon-Microsoft vs. Police Departments

Amazon and Microsoft have imposed moratoriums from selling its facial recognition APIs to law enforcement agencies.

“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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