Last Week in AI #190: Meta AI to translate speech, FedEx abandons last-mile delivery robots, overhyped medicine AI, and more!

Meta unveils AI that directly performs speech-to-speech translation, FedEx discontinuing last-mile delivery robots, AI in medicine facing reproducibility crises

Top News

Using AI to Translate Speech For a Primarily Oral Language

Meta has developed an AI translation system that can convert an oral language, Hokkien, to spoken English. CEO Mark Zuckerberg and software engineer Peng-Jen Chen shared a video demonstrating the tech on Wednesday. Hokkien, a language spoken by 45 million people, is one of 3000 other oral languages without an official, standard written system. This makes traditional text-based translation systems inapplicable. The system was developed as part of Meta's AI project called Universal Speech Translator, or UST. Meta also worked with Hokkien speakers to check translations, and is releasing its models, data, and research as open-source information for other researchers to utilize.

Our Take: This is certainly an impressive step toward developing AI that to help eliminate language barriers. Similar tech will eventually allow people to talk to anyone with the help of real-time speech translations. The focus on directly translating speech and dealing with audio is an important one. This will also benefit speech-to-speech translation for languages that are written - as such a model does not need intermediate speech-to-text and text-to-text stages. Currently, Meta's translation approach can only handle one sentence at a time, so there is definitely still room for improvement.

FedEx abandons its last-mile delivery robot program

In 2019, FedEx partnered with a company founded by the inventor of Segway to build Roxos, small wheeled robots for last-mile deliveries. This month, FedEx ended this program, citing its inability to deliver “necessary near-term value requirements.” Like other last-mile delivery robots, Roxo is meant to go on sidewalks, walk between pedestrians and parked cars, and eventually deliver packages to a customer’s door. FedEx tested this platform in Tennessee, New Hampshire, and Texas, but it seems like the trials did not go well.

Our take: Merely weeks after Amazon scaled back Scout, its own last-mile delivery robot program, FedEx is now doing the same. This points to a greater theme of profitable self-driving car applications are just really hard to get right. Maybe the limitation of current robot hardware form factors, AI, and delivery requirements are just not suited for last-mile delivery robots. Given these two recent setbacks, it’s unlikely that last-mile delivery robots will be commercially realized in the near future, barring significant advances in the underlying robot technology.

AI in Medicine Is Overhyped

AI models that diagnose diseases are commonplace these days, with papers and companies often reporting their models can perform such tasks with greater accuracy than human physicians. However, recent research has found that these models often perform worse than what’s reported in the original papers, and the performance degrades more with larger datasets. This overconfidence problem is often caused by data leakage - researchers using test datasets to tune the model, instead of validation sets (analogous to a student looking at the “answers” of an exam before taking it). Rigorous validation of medical AI is very difficult, as every clinical population is different. However, the field could borrow from other areas that also had reproducibility crises - like doing pre-registration of evaluation metrics and datasets before conducting experiments. There are a lot of risks and potential harm in deploying clinical AI without such care.

Our take: The first CNN prototypes that diagnosed diseases from CT or X-Ray scans were built many years ago, and I vaguely remember many proclaiming then that physicians may soon be displaced by AI models. This hasn’t happened yet, and it is unlikely to happen any time soon. The gap between tech innovation and tech deployment is often bigger and more uncertain than people estimate. This is especially true in mission-critical applications, like medicine, where misdiagnoses could bring significant harm to the user. It is also especially true for domains where additional context (e.g. patient history, state of the medical equipment, how the images were gathered, etc), beyond the immediate observations (e.g. the CT scan), is often needed to make accurate assessments.

Other News

Research

Machine Learning Highlights a Hidden Order in Scents - "Efforts to build a better digital “nose” suggest that our perception of scents reflects both the structure of aromatic molecules and the metabolic processes that make them. "

CarperAI, an EleutherAI lab, announces plans for the first open-source “instruction-tuned” language model. - "The open-source LLM was trained using Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback, a technique to improve LLMs' safety and ease of use. "

NVIDIA’s Implicit Warping Is a Potentially Powerful Deepfake Technique - "New research from Tel Aviv University may prove capable of bringing authentic human motion to text-to-video synthesis, videogames, motion capture architectures in VFX pipelines, and also function as a synthetic data generator for downstream research initiatives, among a myriad of other potential app"

With morphing limbs, a robot that travels by land and water - "Imagine being able to morph your legs into flippers before you jump in the water. Yale researchers have created a robot that accomplishes this feat through a process they dubbed “adaptive morphogenesis.” The project is described in the Oct."

New Machine Learning Tool to Predict Pneumonia Progression Outperforms PSI - "A newly designed, gradient-boosting machine learning model to predict clinical deterioration in pneumonia (CDiP) outperformed the pneumonia severity index (PSI) in predicting risk of in-hospital disease progression."

Introducing FathomNet: New open-source image database unlocks the power of AI for ocean exploration - "A new collaborative effort between MBARI and other research institutions is leveraging the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning to accelerate efforts to study the ocean."

Latest Machine Learning Research At Apple Proposes 'DD-GloVe,' A Train-Time Debiasing Algorithm To Learn Word Embeddings By Leveraging Dictionary Definitions - "Word embeddings can capture semantic and syntactic similarities between words meaningfully. Word2Vec, GloVe, and FastText are popular embeddings."

Jellyfish-like soft gripper mimics the mechanics of curly hair - "If you've ever played the claw game at an arcade, you know how hard it is to grab and hold onto objects using robotics grippers."

Latest Machine Learning Research at UC Berkeley Proposes a Way to Design a Learned Optimizer Using Generative Models of Neural Network Checkpoints - "An optimizer learning to optimize can leverage its previous experiences to overcome this barrier and accelerate future development in deep learning."

Watch two Mini Cheetah robots square off on the soccer field - "Some robotics challenges have immediately clear applications. Others are more focused on helping systems solve broader challenges. Teaching small robots to play soccer against one another fits firmly into the latter category."

Applications

Adobe’s latest AI prototype gives even the worst dancers some impressive moves - "Adobe will reveal a prototype AI project later today at Adobe Max 2022 that can convert a still image of a person into an animated dancer."

Artificial intelligence answers the call for quail information - "When states want to gauge quail populations, the process can be grueling, time-consuming and expensive. It means spending hours in the field listening for calls. Or leaving a recording device in the field to catch what sounds are made -- only to spend hours later listening to that audio."

Adobe adds AI masking and content-aware healing to Lightroom 2022 - "Adobe Lightroom 2022 has arrived, and the latest features are all about making it easier to select people or objects to adjust their colors or remove them completely. The key features, AI-powered masking and content-aware remove, are available on Lightroom, Lightroom Classic and Adobe Camera RAW."

Restored 19th Century Portraits Brought to Life Using AI - "Lorenzo Folli and Olga Shirnina of Mystery Scoop put together a fascinating compilation of historical 19th Century portraits that were digitally restored and brought to life using AI software. "

FDA clears noninvasive AI-powered coronary anatomy, plaque analyses - "HeartFlow announced it has received FDA 510(k) clearance on two new noninvasive artificial intelligence-powered coronary artery anatomy and plaque analyses based on coronary CT angiography."

AI Knows How Much You’re Willing to Pay for Flights Before You Do - "Fed by data on everything from internet searches and Covid outbreaks to weather forecasts and football results, computers are learning how everyday life influences demand for flights."

Business

How John Deere plans to build a world of fully autonomous farming by 2030 - "Can John Deere become one of the leading AI and robotics companies in the world alongside Tesla and Silicon Valley technology giants over the next decade?"

Ambi Robotics Raises Funding for New Kind of Warehouse Robot - " A startup called Ambi Robotics has raised $32 million to put a new kind of robot into e-commerce warehouses."

Self-Driving Tech Startups Are Driving Off A Cliff On Public Markets - "A Crunchbase analysis of 14 companies developing technologies tied to self-driving vehicles that went public in the past couple of years shows an average post-debut decline of more than 80%."

AI content platform Jasper raises $125M at a $1.5B valuation - "As the enthusiasm around AI image and text generators grows, Jasper, a startup developing what it describes as an “AI content” platform, has raised $125 million at a $1.5 billion valuation."

A.I.-driven robots are cooking your dinner - "That’s the vision of Ajay Sunkara, who launched the Pizzaiola autonomous chef, an A.I.-driven, voice-controlled pizza maker that’s making its way to Chicago-based regional pizza chain, Slice Factory."

Venture FOMO Returns as Investors Chase Artificial Intelligence Deals - "Jasper AI, Stability AI raised recent rounds that value the startups at $1 billion or more, while Descript is in talks to raise more funding."

Photoshop is making it easier to quickly edit and collaborate on projects - "Photoshop is getting some new collaboration tools and AI capabilities to help remove some of the more tedious parts of image editing."

Adobe’s AI prototype pastes objects into photos while adding realistic lighting and shadows - "Every year at Adobe Max, Adobe shows off what it calls “Sneaks,” R&D projects that might — or might not — find their way into commercial products someday. This year is no exception, and lucky for us, we were given a preview ahead of the conference proper."

Microsoft in Advanced Talks to Increase Investment in OpenAI - "Microsoft is in advanced talks for a new round of funding in OpenAI, according to a person familiar with the matter, as the software giant seeks to further incorporate artificial intelligence into its products."

TikTok tries to help usher in an age of machine learning advertising - "The news: TikTok announced Smart Performance Campaigns at its TikTok World event, an ad product that uses machine learning to “run performance campaigns at scale, while reducing the number of manual steps to drive results."

Google in Talks to Invest $200 Million Into AI Startup - "Founded in 2019, Cohere creates natural language processing software that developers can then use to build artificial intelligence applications for businesses, including tools for chatbots and other features that can understand human speech and text."

A Coming-Out Party for Generative A.I., Silicon Valley’s New Craze - "Continue reading the main storyContinue reading the main storyA celebration for Stability AI, the start-up behind the controversial Stable Diffusion image generator, represents the arrival of a new A.I. boom.167Emad Mostaque, the founder and chief executive of the start-up Stability AI.Credit..."

Generally Intelligent secures cash from OpenAI vets to build capable AI systems - "A new AI research company is launching out of stealth today with an ambitious goal: to research the fundamentals of human intelligence that machines currently lack."

Intel’s Mobileye sets IPO terms significantly below target valuation - "Mobileye, the self-driving car unit of Intel, set terms for its initial public offering on Tuesday, with plans to begin trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange late next week."

IKEA teams with self-driving truck startup Kodiak Robotics to test deliveries in Texas - "Self-driving truck startup Kodiak Robotics said that it has begun a pilot program with IKEA in Texas. The trucks have human safety drivers on board, but they're being driven by Kodiak's autonomous-driving system."

Concerns

That company's 'About Us' page may be full of fake pictures of 'people' who don't actually exist - "Some companies are using fake, AI-generated images of "staff" who don't exist on their "about us" pages in an attempt to make their company look bigger."

AI Data Laundering: How Academic and Nonprofit Researchers Shield Tech Companies from Accountability - "Like he did for the Stable Diffusion data, Simon Willison created a Datasette browser to explore WebVid-10M, one of the two datasets used to train the video generation model, and quickly learned that all 10.7 million video clips were scraped from Shutterstock, watermarks and all."

A.I. chatbot is leading a Danish political party and setting its policies. Now users are grilling it for its stance on political landmines - "The Synthetic Party, launched in May 2022, is setting its sights on November’s election—and bases all its policies on its A.I. figurehead “Leader Lars”."

GitHub Users Want to Sue Microsoft For Training an AI Tool With Their Code - "Open-source coders are investigating a potential class-action lawsuit against Microsoft after the company used their publicly-available code to train its latest AI tool."

Explainer: Killer drones vie for supremacy over Ukraine - "They are precise, small in size, able to effectively penetrate air defenses when fired in groups. Above all, they’re cheap."

AI art looks way too European - "DALL-E and other models keep making art that ignores traditions from the rest of the world."

These artists found out their work was used to train AI. Now they’re furious - "Erin Hanson has spent years developing the vibrant color palette and chunky brushstrokes that define the vivid oil paintings for which she is known. But during a recent interview with her, I showed Hanson my attempts to recreate her style with just a few keystrokes."

Artificial intelligence is being used to generate a whole new kind of online scam - "For the past two years, I've been following a woman around the internet. It sounds ominous, I know, but hear me out. Her name is Albertina Geller, and I first stumbled across her online in October 2020, on LinkedIn. She'd listed herself as a "self-employed freelancer" in Chicago."

Clearview AI Gets €20M French Data Privacy Fine - "Clearview AI was fined €20 million for illegally collecting and using personal data through biometric monitoring of people in France. "

Analysis

82% of Marketers Say AI-Generated Content Is as Good as Human-Generated One - "Learn what marketers think about AI content generation tools and the content generated by them from this article."

Google Lamda: A glimpse at the ultra-realistic chat tech - "Google has launched a UK version of an app that lets users interact with the artificial-intelligence system one of its engineers has claimed is sentient. It is a very limited trial, with just three scenarios to choose from."

A.I.-Generated Art Is Already Transforming Creative Work - "Only a few months old, apps like DALL-E 2, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion are changing how filmmakers, interior designers and other creative professionals do their jobs."

I Co-Wrote This With an AI Writing Tool - "Can you distinguish which parts each of us wrote?"

Generative A.I. Is Here. Who Should Control It? - "We sit down with the founder of Stability AI, Emad Mostaque, on the heels of his $101 million fund-raising round."

Policy

US court rules, once again, that AI software can’t hold a patent - "The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has ruled that AI software cannot be a registered inventor of a US patent, Reuters reports, though the issue could be subject to further appeal. "

Choking Off China’s Access to the Future of AI - "New U.S. Export Controls on AI and Semiconductors Mark a Transformation of U.S. Technology Competition with China "

Expert Opinions

Microsoft's Copilot AI is making rapid progress. Here's what its human leader thinks about it - "Earlier this year, LinkedIn co-founder and venture capitalist Reid Hoffman issued a warning mixed with amazement about AI. "There is literally magic happening," said Hoffman, speaking to technology executives across sectors of the economy."

Explainers

History Of AI In 33 Breakthroughs: The First AI-Driven Robot - "The just-issued World Robotics Report announced an all-time high of 517,385 new industrial robots installed in 2021 in factories around the world, representing 31% year-on-year growth. That brought the current stock of operational robots around the globe to about 3.5 million, a new record."

Fun

Bizarre Halloween Candy Courtesy of AI Tool Dall-E: Farte Cats, Anyone? - "The DIY art world hasn't been the same since the passing of Bob Ross (rest in peace in a forest of happy little trees, king), but AI art creation tool Dall-E at least offers an entertaining and quicker way to generate masterpieces that seem appropriate for the bizarro timeline we all now share."

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