Every gene in the human genome exists in a variety of mutations, and some encode protein variants that cause cells to malfunction, resulting in illness. Yet which mutations are associated with disease is largely unknown.

Visual robots typically perceive the three-dimensional world through sequences of two-dimensional images, but they don’t always know what they’re looking at. For instance, Tesla’s self-driving system has been known to mistake a full moon for a traffic light.

Machine learning changes fast. Take natural language processing. Word2vec, introduced in 2013, quickly replaced one-hot encoding with word embeddings. Transformers revolutionized the field in 2017 by parallelizing the previously sequential training process.

In 2021, transformers were harnessed to discover drugs, recognize speech, and paint pictures — and much more.

The cost of training top-performing machine learning models has grown beyond the reach of smaller companies.

Microsoft is making GPT-3 available to selected customers through its Azure cloud service.

The emerging generation of trillion-parameter models needs datasets of billions of examples, but the most readily available source of examples on that scale — the web — is polluted with bias and antisocial expressions. A new study examines the issue.

Google will upgrade its search engine with a new model that tracks the relationships between words, images, and, in time, videos — the first fruit of its latest research into multimodal machine learning and multilingual language modeling.

Self-attention enables transformer networks to track relationships between distant tokens — such as text characters — in long sequences, but the computational resources required grow quadratically with input size.

Neural networks translated a paralyzed man’s brainwaves into conversational phrases. Researchers trained a system to interpret electrical impulses from the brain of a man who had lost the ability to speak 15 years ago, and displayed them as words on a video screen.

A libel-detection system could help news outlets and social media companies stay out of legal hot water. CaliberAI, an Irish startup, scans text for statements that could be considered defamatory, Wired reported.

A new study suggests tactics for machine learning engineers to cut their carbon emissions. Led by David Patterson, researchers at Google and UC Berkeley found that AI developers can shrink a model’s carbon footprint a thousand-fold by streamlining architecture...

A new tool aims to let video gamers control how much vitriol they receive from fellow players. Intel announced a voice recognition tool called Bleep that the company claims can moderate voice chat automatically, allowing users to silence offensive language.

Performance in language tasks rises with the size of the model — yet, as a model’s parameter count rises, so does the time it takes to render output. New work pumps up the number of parameters without slowing down the network.

A grassroots research collective aims to make a GPT-3 clone that’s available to everyone. EleutherAI, a loose-knit group of independent researchers, is developing GPT-Neo, an open source, free-to-use version of OpenAI’s gargantuan language model.