AI News in 2021: a Detailed Digest
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AI News in 2021: a Detailed Digest
An overview of the big AI-related stories from 2021
Happy new year!
With 2021 over, we’d like to reflect on what’s happened in AI during a year that began in the midst of the pandemic, and ended still in the midst of the pandemic. Above is a wordcloud of the most common words used in titles of articles we’ve curated in our newsletter over this past year.
This reflects about 1250 articles that we’ve included in the newsletter in 2021:
Digging a bit deeper, we can see the most popular topics covered in these news articles based on words seen in their titles:
Among institutions, Google still receives by far the most coverage:
But enough overview – let’s go through the most significant articles we’ve curated from the past year, month by month.
As in with our newsletter, these articles will be about applications, research, business, concerns, and more. They will be presented in chronological order, and represent a curated selection that we believe are particularly noteworthy.
January
Newsletter links: Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4
Highlights:
Why we must democratize AI to invest in human prosperity, with Frank Pasquale
Why we must democratize AI to invest in human prosperity, with Frank Pasquale
Use of Clearview AI facial recognition tech spiked as law enforcement seeks to identify Capitol mob
Our Short Summary: A big topic carried over from last year is the explosion of facial recognition software and the growing public pushback they are receiving, and January started off with new lawsuits and regulations on their uses. Separately, OpenAI publicized a new impressive work called CLIP that is able to generate pictures from language prompts.
February
Newsletter links: Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4 | Week 5
Highlights:
These crowdsourced maps will show exactly where surveillance cameras are watching
Why the OECD wants to calculate the AI compute needs of national governments
Deepfake porn is ruining women’s lives. Now the law may finally ban it
Band of AI startups launch ‘rebel alliance’ for interoperability
Google fires researcher Margaret Mitchell amid chaos in AI division
Our Short Summary: Another thread carried over from last year is the turmoil at Google’s Ethical AI team. Following the firing of researcher Timnit Gebru, Google fired Margaret Mitchell, leading to more controversy in the press. Again on the topic of facial recognition, a crowdsourced map was produced by Amnesty International to expose where these cameras might be watching. An OECD task force led by former OpenAI policy director Jack Clark was formed to calculate compute needs for national governments in an effort to craft better-informed AI policy.
March
Newsletter links: Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4
Highlights:
Clearview AI sued in California by immigrant rights groups, activists
Underpaid Workers Are Being Forced to Train Biased AI on Mechanical Turk
Our Short Summary: The AI Index report released in March paints an optimistic outlook on the future of AI development - we are seeing significant increases in private AI R&D, especially in the healthcare. Simultaneously, concerns about AI continue to manifest. Karen Hao of the MIT Technology Review interviewed an important player in Facebook’s AI Ethics group, and found that Facebook was over-focusing on AI bias at the expense of grappling with the more destructive features of its AI systems. In another development stemming from Google’s Ethical AI fallout, a researcher publicly rejected a grant from the behemoth.
April
Newsletter links: Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4 | Week 5
Highlights:
Boston Dynamics unveils Stretch: a new robot designed to move boxes in warehouses
EU is cracking down on AI, but leaves a loophole for mass surveillance
Our Short Summary: Another report release in April, the Analysis on U.S. AI Workforce, shows how AI workers grew 4x as fast as all U.S. occupations. In this month we also saw more reports of EU’s growing regulations on AI commercial applications in high-risk areas. This is an important legislative framework that may be borrowed by other governments in thef future.
May
Newsletter links: Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4
Highlights:
Our Short Summary: Late May saw Google announcing their new large language models that can significantly impact how search and other Google products work in the future. This builds on top of the explosion of language model sizes over the last two years. Perhaps this drive to commercialize large language models is behind the firing of its Ethical AI team leads months before, who at the time were focused on characterizing the potential harm of using such models.
June
Newsletter links: Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4 | Week 5
Highlights:
King County is first in the country to ban facial recognition software
Google is using AI to design its next generation of AI chips more quickly than humans can
The False Comfort of Human Oversight as an Antidote to A.I. Harm
DeepMind scientist calls for ethical AI as Google faces ongoing backlash
LinkedIn’s job-matching AI was biased. The company’s solution? More AI.
Our Short Summary: A worrying report from the U.N. surfaced in June that describes the possibility of a drone making autonomous target and attack soldiers during last year’s Libya conflicts. The report remains to be independently verified, but proliferation of autonomous lethal weapons looms large as there are no global agreements that limit their use. Also as a sign of things to come, June also saw King County banning government use of facial recognition technology, the first of such regulations in the U.S.
July
Newsletter links: Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4
Highlights:
AI Generated Art Scene Explodes as Hackers Create Groundbreaking New Tools
Why Robots Can’t Be Counted On to Find Survivors in the Florida Building Collapse
Maine Now Has the Toughest Facial Recognition Restrictions in the U.S.
How TikTok’s hate speech detection tool set off a debate about racial bias on the app
US sanctions a Chinese facial recognition company with Silicon Valley funding
Our Short Summary: CLIP+VQGAN is the technology developed by OpenAI that allows users to direct AI image generation with text prompts. While these tools have been publicized since January, AI-generated art using this technique has really taken off during the summer. The details of DeepMind’s AlphaFold2 were also shared this month and the technology was open sourced. As throughout the year as a whole, concerns and actions related to facial recognition were prominent this month. The GitHub CoPilot, an AI powered ‘autocomplete for programming’, was announced to much excitement.
August
Newsletter links: Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4 | Week 5
Highlights:
China built the world’s largest facial recognition system. Now, it’s getting camera-shy.
NSF partnerships expand National AI Research Institutes to 40 states
A new generation of AI-powered robots is taking over warehouses
OpenAI can translate English into code with its new machine learning software Codex
Twitter AI bias contest shows beauty filters hoodwink the algorithm
Elon Musk unveils ‘Tesla bot,’ a humanoid robot that would be made from Tesla’s self-driving AI
“Flying in the Dark”: Hospital AI Tools Aren’t Well Documented
Our Short Summary: This month a team of 100+ Stanford researchers published a 200+ pages paper On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models. Foundation models refer to large models trained on vast amounts of data, like GPT-3, that can be transferred to downstream tasks that don’t have a lot of data. While the name of “foundation” and how the paper was released stirred up some controversy, it is undeniable that large pre-trained models will continue to play a large role in AI moving forward, and the paper gives many insights on their capabilities and limitations. Otherwise, the typical trends of seeing many stories about facial recognition, bias, and self-driving persisted.
September
Newsletter links: Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4
Highlights:
Only Humans, Not AI Machines, Can Get a U.S. Patent, Judge Rules
How AI’s full power can accelerate the fight against climate change
These weird, unsettling photos show that AI is getting smarter
First AI Pathology Program Approved: Helps Detect Prostate Cancer
Our Short Summary: A U.S. federal had ruled that under current U.S. law, only people can be listed as inventors of patents, not AI algorithms. Supporters of this ruling cite the concern of AI-powered patent trolls, which may use AI to “generate” countless patents in the hope of benefiting from potential patent infringement lawsuits. Critics of this ruling say that AI-authored patents can incentivize the development of such AIs. Regardless, the U.S. can still allow AI-authored patents, but it will need new laws from Congress. As the highlights above show, there was a healthy mix of positive news related to AI as well as new information regarding scandals surrounding misinformation and military contracts.
October
Newsletter links: Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4
Highlights:
DeepMind’s AI predicts almost exactly when and where it’s going to rain
Are AI ethics teams doomed to be a facade? The women who pioneered them weigh in
Singapore sends Xavier the robot to help police keep streets safe under three-week trial
Google Researchers Explore the Limits of Large-Scale Model Pretraining
Our Short Summary: We saw several articles relevant to one of the biggest stories in AI from the past year – the firing of Dr. Timnit Gebru from Google. The above highlights suggest that lawyers are involved in reviewing research, which is quite unusual, and include a discussion about AI ethids research in industry more broadly. We saw yet another story about Clearview AI, a constant throghought the year. On the research side, many roboticists were excited about DeepMind acquiring and open sourcing the Mujoco physics simulator. DeepMind also continued its trend of applying Machine Learning to practical problems as it had done with AlphaFold 2, this time with new research on impressively accurate rain prediction.
November
Newsletter links: Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4 | Week 5
Highlights:
Facebook, Citing Societal Concerns, Plans to Shut Down Facial Recognition System
Tesla vehicle in ‘Full Self-Driving’ beta mode ‘severely damaged’ after crash in California
French AI strategy: Tech sector to receive over €2 bln in next 5 years
Alphabet is putting its prototype robots to work cleaning up around Google’s offices
A Utah company says it’s revolutionized truth-telling technology. Experts are highly skeptical.
A Whopping 301 Newly Confirmed Exoplanets – Discovered With New Deep Neural Network ExoMiner
Creepy Humanoid Robo-Artist Gives Public Performance Of Its Own AI-Generated Poetry
Alphabet is putting its prototype robots to work cleaning up around Google’s offices
Our Short Summary: On Oct. 28 Adobe announced a new AI-powered video editing tool called Project Morpheus. It can be used to edit people’s expressions and other facial attributes, leading to some being concerned about it being a DeepFake tool despite its capabilities being quite limited. In a surprise announcement, Facebook has stated it will no longer use facial recognition on its service, and will even delete billions of records that were used as part of it. This was hailed as a welcome step by privacy advocates. Alphabet has announced that its Everyday Robots Project team has been deploying its robots to carry out custodial tasks on Google’s Bay Area campuses, in a cool demonstration of the progress their team has made since starting to work on getting robots out of their labs and out into the real world.
December
Newsletter links: Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4
Highlights:
DeepMind AI collaborates with humans on two mathematical breakthroughs
Clearview AI told to stop processing UK data as ICO warns of possible fine
The Beatles: Get Back Used High-Tech Machine Learning To Restore The Audio
Our Short Summary: Most dramatically, exactly a year ago since announcing her being fired, Dr Timnit Gebru announced her new Distributed AI Research institute. This organization is meant to be independent of big tech funding, and therefore more effective at doing impactful AI ethics research. DeepMind once again impressed with another cross-disciplinary research work, this time with the focus being on mathematics. Yet more developments were covered with regards to Clearview, this time about it being penalized outside of the US. On the whole, the year ended without much excitement.
Conclusion
And so another year of AI news comes to an end. We obviously could not cover all the developments in this digest, so if you’d like to keep up with AI news on an on-going basis, subscribe to our ‘Last Week in AI’ newsletter!
To finish, thank you for being a subscriber to our little newsletter! We enjoy putting it together a lot, and hope to keep at it for all of 2022 just as we have for this past year.