Commercial AI research and deployments are on the rise, a new study highlights. The latest edition of the AI Index, an annual report from Stanford University, documents key trends in the field including the growing importance of private industry and the erosion of U.S. dominance in research.

U.S. government approval of medical AI products is on the upswing — but information about how such systems were built is largely unavailable. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved a a plethora of AI-driven medical systems.

A model designed to assess medical patients’ pain levels matched the patients’ own reports better than doctors’ estimates did — when the patients were Black.

A pair of neural networks is helping to prioritize Covid-19 cases for contact tracing. The public health department of California’s Contra Costa County is using deep learning to sort Covid-19 cases reported via the pre-internet technology known as fax.

Can social media posts reveal early signs of mental illness? A new machine learning model shows promising results. Researchers developed a model that analyzes messages and images posted by Facebook users for indicators of psychological problems.

U.S. lawmakers authorized a slew of national programs that promote artificial intelligence research, development, and deployment, and support efforts to make sure the results are ethical and trustworthy.

A survey of AI in large companies sees boom times ahead — if AI teams can get past issues that surround implementation. Businesses of all sizes are using more machine learning, spending more on it, and hiring more engineers to wrangle it.

Look at the tip of a standard #2 pencil. Now, imagine performing over one trillion multiplication operations in the area of that pencil tip every second. This can be accomplished using today’s 7nm semiconductor technology.

Institutional hurdles to AI for medicine began to fall, setting the stage for widespread clinical use of deep learning in medical devices and treatments. DeepMind’s AlphaFold model determined the three-dimensional shape of a protein in just hours.

AI accelerated the search for a coronavirus vaccine, detected Covid-19 cases, and otherwise softened the pandemic’s blow. Machine learning researchers worldwide scrambled to harness the technology against the coronavirus.

A computer vision system is helping to keep runners with impaired vision on track.What’s new: A prototype smartphone app developed by Google translates camera images into audio signals.

The U.S. government’s effort to take advantage of AI has not lived up to its promise, according to a new report. Implementations of machine learning systems by federal agencies are “uneven at best, and problematic and perhaps dangerous at worst".

The world’s most sophisticated language model won’t replace your doctor anytime soon. Researchers at Nabla, an AI-enabled healthcare platform, found that GPT-3 lacks the logical reasoning skills to be a useful medical chatbot.

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.

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