Will AI promote lies that deepen social divisions? Propagandists will bait online recommendation algorithms with sensationalized falsehoods. People who snap at the clickbait will be reeled into opposing ideological silos.

Will international rivalries fragment international cooperation in machine learning? Countries competing for AI dominance will lash out at competitors.

What if AI requires so much computation that it becomes unaffordable?The fear: Training ever more capable models will become too pricey for all but the richest corporations and government agencies. Rising costs will

Will AI that discriminates based on race, gender, or economic status undermine the public’s confidence in the technology? Seduced by the promise of cost savings and data-driven decision making, organizations will deploy biased systems that end up doing real-world damage.

Will we ever understand what goes on inside the mind of a neural network?The fear: When AI systems go wrong, no one will be able to explain the reasoning behind their decisions.

Controversy erupted over the need for transparency in research into AI for medicine. Google Health introduced a system that purportedly identified breast cancer more accurately than human radiologists.

A new multimedia experience lets audience members help artificially intelligent creatures work together to survive. Agence, an interactive virtual reality (VR) project blends audience participation with reinforcement learning to create an experience that’s half film, half video game.

An AI-powered eye in the sky is helping firefighters control woodland blazes. California used maps drawn by neural networks to fight fires that threatened Yosemite National Park earlier this year.

Benchmarks provide a scientific basis for evaluating model performance, but they don’t necessarily map well to human cognitive abilities. Facebook aims to close the gap through a dynamic benchmarking method that keeps humans in the loop.

Two European capitals launched public logs of AI systems used by the government. Amsterdam and Helsinki provide online registries that describe the algorithms that govern municipal activities, such as automated parking control and a public health chatbot.

Documentary filmmakers often shield the identities of people who might be harmed for speaking out. But typical tactics like blurring faces and distorting voices can make it hard for audiences to connect emotionally. A new

Trying on new makeup is a hassle — apply, inspect, wash off, repeat. Not to mention the tribulation of visiting brick-and-mortar stores during the pandemic. Augmented reality is helping people try on all the makeup they want without leaving home.

Facing a tsunami of user-generated disinformation, YouTube is scrambling to stop its recommendation algorithm from promoting videos that spread potentially dangerous falsehoods.

An open source library could spawn trillion-parameter neural networks and help small-time developers build big-league models. Microsoft upgraded DeepSpeed, a library that accelerates the PyTorch deep learning framework.

AI has humbled human chess masters. Now it’s helping them take the game to the next level. DeepMind and retired chess champion Vladimir Kramnik trained AlphaZero, a reinforcement learning model that bested human experts in chess, Go, and Shogi, to play-test changes in the rules.