Bits & Bytes - 9.29.17

Bits & bytes

End of an era.

• With the increasing traction of PyTorch and the resulting renewed vigor in the deep learning framework wars, Yoshua Bengio and the team at the University of Montreal’s MILA are throwing in the towel and terminating Theano development with the upcoming 1.0 release.

Unifying reinforcement learning.

• Game platform developer Unity Technologies recently introduced Unity Machine Learning Agents, an SDK targeting both researchers and game developers for training intelligent agents using reinforcement learning and other techniques in game environments and virtual worlds. For background on this, check out TWIML Talk #24, where I spoke to Danny Lange, VP for ML & AI at Unity about the role of RL in gaming, and the huge opportunities available to game platforms.

Training on a panoply of panoramic views.

• Interesting new dataset from 3D camera maker Matterport. The Matterport 3D dataset consists of 10,800 aligned 3D panoramic views (RGB + depth per pixel) from 194,400 RGB + depth images of 90 building-scale scenes, all hand-labeled with instance-level object segmentation.

Trolling AI Twitter.

• AI luminary Pedro Domingos spent a few days trolling AI Twitter last week, yours truly included, on the topic of algorithmic ethics and discrimination. Personally, I get what he’s trying to say but think his comments amount to arguing semantics, and are fairly irresponsible for someone of his stature in the field. Does anyone out there know him and/or can get him on the podcast?

Chip chat.

• Intel is touting a forthcoming “neuromorphic” chip design that takes inspiration from the human brain. NVIDIA announced the Deep Learning Accelerator, an open source hardware architecture for deep learning inference acceleration. CNBC is spreading rumors that Tesla has tapped AMD to collaborate on an AI chip. Meanwhile, Imagination Technologies will offer an AI chip design that chip makers can embed within their own designs, focused on image and signal processing.

Show me the money.

• Baidu announced a $1.5 billion fund for investing in self-driving car startups. Video object detection startup Matroid raises a $10 million series A. Catch my conversation with founder Reza Zadeh on the pod. TalkIQ raises $14 million to help enterprises spy on analyze recorded voice conversations.