Jun 30, 2021

Last week, I mentioned that one difference between traditional software and AI products is the problem of unclear technical feasibility. In short, it can be hard to tell whether it’s practical to build a particular AI system.

An AI system is helping aircraft avoid bad weather, restricted airspace, and clogged runways. Alaska Airlines will route all its flights using a system from Airspace Intelligence called Flyways.

Many people both outside and inside the tech industry believe that AI will serve mostly to boost profits and monitor people — without regard for negative consequences.

Shoppers at Amazon’s newest grocery store can skip the checkout line. Amazon opened its first full-scale supermarket that monitors which items customers place in their cart and charges them automatically when they leave. It calls the system Just Walk Out.

Getting high accuracy out of a classifier trained on a small number of examples is tricky. You might train the model on several large-scale datasets prior to few-shot training, but what if the few-shot dataset includes novel classes? A new method performs well even in that case.

Last week, I mentioned that one difference between traditional software and AI products is the problem of unclear technical feasibility. In short, it can be hard to tell whether it’s practical to build a particular AI system.