As language models show increasing power, a parallel trend has received less notice: The vogue for naming models after characters in the children’s TV show Sesame Street.

The number of patents issued for deep learning has doubled every year since 2013. Inventor, engineer, and lawyer Nick Brestoff tracks deep learning patents. He detailed his findings in a blog on InsideBigData and offers advice on how to get patent applications approved.

Smart doorbell maker Ring has built its business by turning neighborhoods into surveillance networks. Now the company is drawing fire for using private data without informing customers and sharing data with police.

China announced a ban on fake news, targeting deepfakes in particular. The Cyberspace Administration of China issued new rules restricting online audio and video, especially content created using AI.

A U.S. federal judge ruled that the public must be able to see records from a government-chartered AI advisory group. The court decided that the National Security Commission on AI, which guides defense research into AI-powered warfighting technology, must respond to freedom-of-information requests.

Google's AI platform offers a view into the mind of its machines. Explainable AI (xAI) tools show which features exerted the most influence on a model’s decision, so users can evaluate model performance and potentially mitigate biased results.

Is there any reason to continue playing games that AI has mastered? Ask the former champions who have been toppled by machines.

Foreign researchers hoping to attend one of AI’s largest conferences were denied entry into Canada, where the event will be held. Most of those blocked were from developing nations.

Google spent the past year training an AI-powered health care program using personal information from one of the largest hospital systems in the U.S. Patients had no idea — until last week.

In March 2018, one of Uber’s self-driving cars became the first autonomous vehicle reported to have killed a pedestrian. A new report by U.S. authorities suggests that the accident occurred because the car’s software was programmed to ignore jaywalkers.

Neuroevolution, which combines neural networks with ideas drawn from Darwin, is gaining momentum. Its advocates claim that they can achieve faster, better results by generating a succession of new models, each slightly different than its predecessors, rather than relying on a purpose-built model.

At the BlizzCon gaming convention last weekend, players of the strategy game StarCraft II stood in line to get walloped by DeepMind’s AI. After training for the better part of a year, the bot has become one of the world’s top players.

Amazon, watch your back. There’s a new player in the book business and, unlike Jeff Bezos, it doesn’t need eight hours of sleep a night. The online bookstore Booksby.ai is run entirely by AI. Neural networks write the books, create the cover art, price the merchandise, even write the reviews.

Could humanity be destroyed by its own creation? If binary code running on a computer awakens into sentience, it will be able to think better than humans. It may even be able to improve its own software and hardware.

Will AI fakery erode public trust in the key social institutions? Generative models will flood media outlets with convincing but false photos, videos, ads, and news stories. The ensuing crisis of authority will lead to widespread distrust in everything from the financial system to democracy itself.