Year in Review

18 Posts

Illustration of three deers doing holiday household chores: washing a champagne flute, cooking pie and wrapping a gift
Year in Review

One Model Does It All: Multi-task AI models got more sophisticated in 2022.

Individual deep learning models proved their mettle in hundreds of tasks. The scope of multi-task models expanded dramatically in the past year.
Illustration of a person shoveling snow with the help of a flamethrower
Year in Review

Language Models; Extended: Language models grew more reliable and less biased in 2022.

Researchers pushed the boundaries of language models to address persistent problems of trustworthiness, bias, and updatability.
Illustration of a snowman with a top hat and glasses
Year in Review

AI's Eyes Evolve: Vision transformer research exploded in 2022.

Work on vision transformers exploded in 2022. Researchers published well over 17,000 ViT papers during the year. A major theme: combining self-attention and convolution.
Illustration of The Grinch's hands coding on a tablet
Year in Review

Programmer’s Best Friend: Code generation services took off in 2022.

Behind schedule on a software project? There’s an app for that. Language models fine-tuned on computer code proved capable of generating software routines similar to the work of experienced developers — though the results can be hit-or-miss.
Illustration of an elf workshop creating a red toy car from a description (channeling AI generated images)
Year in Review

Synthetic Images Everywhere: 2022 was the year text-to-image AI went mainstream.

Pictures produced by AI went viral, stirred controversies, and drove investments. A new generation of text-to-image generators inspired a flood of experimentation, transforming text descriptions into mesmerizing artworks and photorealistic fantasies.
A living room made out of cups of coffee: the people, the seats, the chimney, the lamp, all gather around a cozy fire.
Year in Review

One Architecture to Do Them All: Transformer: The AI architecture that can do it all.

The transformer architecture extended its reach to a variety of new domains.What happened: Originally developed for natural language processing, transformers are becoming the Swiss Army Knife of deep learning.
A chorus of reindeers singing carols from a Reindeer Holiday Songbook on a snowy night
Year in Review

Voices for the Voiceless: Generative AI models are creating voices for Hollywood and video games.

Musicians and filmmakers adopted AI as a standard part of the audio-production toolbox. What happened: Professional media makers embraced neural networks that generate new sounds and modify old ones. Voice actors bristled.
Illustration of a woman riding a sled
Year in Review

Multimodal AI Takes Off: Multimodal Models, such as CLIP and DALL·E, are taking over AI.

While models like GPT-3 and EfficientNet, which work on text and images respectively, are responsible for some of deep learning’s highest-profile successes, approaches that find relationships between text and images made impressive
An illustration shows a cozy cabin where all the furniture is made out of coffee mugs.
Year in Review

Transformers Take Over: Transformers Applied to Vision, Language, Video, and More

In 2021, transformers were harnessed to discover drugs, recognize speech, and paint pictures — and much more.
Giant snowman taking over the city while helicopters try to take it down
Year in Review

Governments Lay Down the Law: Governments around the world increasingly regulate AI.

Legislators worldwide wrote new laws — some proposed, some enacted — to rein in societal impacts of automation.What happened: Authorities at all levels ratcheted up regulatory pressure as
Illustration of giant Christmas tree in a town plaza
Year in Review

Trillions of Parameters: Are AI models with trillions of parameters the new normal?

The trend toward ever-larger models crossed the threshold from immense to ginormous. Google kicked off 2021 with Switch Transformer, the first published work to exceed a trillion parameters, weighing in at 1.6 trillion.
Bookstack and wrapping paper
Year in Review

Writer’s Unblock: Language models keep getting bigger and better.

Neural networks for natural language processing got bigger, more prolific, and more fun to play with. Language models, which already had grown to gargantuan size, continued to swell, yielding chatbots that mimic AI luminaries and have very strange ideas about horses.
Doctor examining a snowman holding a broom
Year in Review

The Model Will See You Now: The rise of medical AI in 2020

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.
Group of people having a snowball fight and covering with a giant Facebook like button
Year in Review

Algorithms Against Disinformation: How Facebook, Twitter, and more fought disinfo in 2020.

The worldwide pandemic and a contentious U.S. election whipped up a storm of automated disinformation, and some big AI companies reaped the whirlwind.
Tree farm dataset
Year in Review

Representing the Underrepresented: Many important AI datasets contain bias.

Some of deep learning’s bedrock datasets came under scrutiny as researchers combed them for built-in biases. Researchers found that popular datasets impart biases against socially marginalized groups to trained models due to the ways the datasets were compiled, labeled, and used.

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