đ Department of Driverless Cars
SoftBankâs Vision Fund announced a
$2.25B investment into GM-owned
Cruise Automation hours before
Waymo announced it would
100x its order of Fiat Chrysler vehicles to 62,000. GM, whose position in Cruise is now worth $9.2B, agreed to invest another $1.1B into the company. New employees at Cruise are offered
options directly in the company vs. in the GM parent. Meanwhile, Morgan Stanley analysts upgraded their rating on Alphabet because they believe that Waymo could
grow to $175B in enterprise value đ if its business encompasses ride sharing, logistics and technology/product licensing.
Mapbox launched their Vision SDK, which powers mobile AR-based driving navigation and feature detection at the street level. The company is working with ARM to optimise on-device processing and with Microsoft Azure for streaming incremental data updates to the cloud. This is part of Mapboxâs
push into automotive following SoftBankâs $164M capital injection last year.
On the topic of maps, TechCrunch ran a long piece on
Appleâs efforts to
rebuild their Maps using first party data captured from iPhones but also from vehicles equipped with a full-blown suite of AV sensors. Instead of being explicitly for self-driving, the piece says that these HD maps will serve for real-world AR and publishing much more regular updates to the maps as the physical world changes. I think this move shows that Maps for Apple means more than cartography for navigation but instead it means a live data infrastructure upon which the company can publish applications that require granular real world understanding, e.g. AR games. Or perhaps itâs all to power the iOS12
killer camera-based
ruler feature. Â
Voyage, the SF-based AV company focused on retirement communities, has built their
2nd generation vehicle on the Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivan platform. Along with Waymoâs boosted order, it sounds like Chrysler is getting a new lease of energy by providing picks and shovels for the AV wave! Voyage also entered a partnership with Enterprise Fleet Management who will procure, lease, and service Voyageâs fleet of G2 autonomous vehicles. As such, auto companies focus on what theyâre good at while technology-focused AV companies like Voyage focus on building best of breed software. Commercial terms unknownâŠ
In a wild turn of events,
Zoox has gone from being held up as an ambitious bet to reinvent the car and autonomous mobility (as profiled by Bloomberg
here and WIRED
here) to another major management shakeup that saw the
Board-level ousting of its co-founder and resolute visionary CEO, Tim Kentley-Klay. This firing comes just a month after Zoox closed a massive $500M financing round at a $3.2 billion post-money valuation. The company has raised $800M to date and has 450+ employees. I really hope they make it to market even so.
Uber shut down its self-driving trucking business line (meanwhile trucking company Convoy
just raised $185M at $1B valuation) and its self-driving passenger cars are still off the road post-Arizona. This comes as Uber refocuses on its mission to take you from âA to Bâ using multi-modal transport, ranging from bikes, cars, scooters and potentially public transport (like Lyft has
recently announced). Uber has also accepted a
$500M injection from Toyota, which appears to focus on its self-driving technology platform develop and potential operations of that fleet.
đȘ The giants
Google ultimately decided
not to renew its Maven contract with the US DoD. According to emails obtained from the company, the contract was worth at least $15M and could have grown to $250M. The scope included creating a âGoogle-Earth-likeâ surveillance tool that enabled users to click on a building and âsee everything associated with itâ, as well a monitor assets of interest (vehicles, peopleâŠ). A week after this news, Sundar Pichai published
âAI at Google: our principlesâ, a set of 7 standards that will actively govern their research and product development and impact their business decisions. This includes building for safety, avoiding unfair bias, being socially beneficial and accountable to people, observing privacy, upholding scientific rigor and supporting uses that accord with these principles. Sundar also adds that Google
wonât design or deploy AI in application areas that cause or are likely to cause overall harm, are used in weapons or to injure people, for surveillance or contravenes with human rights and international law. In contrast to the same post available on
Google AIâs microsite, Sundar adds that Google will nonetheless
continue to work with the military and governments in areas such as cybersecurity, training, military recruitment, search and rescue. The lines between supporting cybersecurity for the government/military and not working on surveillance that contravenes with human rights is unclearâŠ
Separately, both
Google and
Facebook announced expansions of their research teams (Google Brain and
FAIR, respectively) around the world. Notably, Google
chose Ghana, which is a hotbed of ambitious talent eager to work in technology. Just have a poke around
Andela to see for yourself! FAIR London is now open, due in part to the acquisition of Bloomsbury.AI (congrats, team!). Whatâs more, DeepMind is supporting professorships at the foundersâ alma mater,
Cambridge and
UCL in machine learning. Seeing successful alumni return to support future generations is, in my view, so much more valuable than the capital gains that many universities attempt to generate by imposing onerous equity ownership/licensing fees on spinouts.
USâs
DARPA announced a $2B investment in AI over the next five years, adding to its 20 existing research programs on the topic. This move indicates that the defense budget of nation states is moving feeling gravitational pull towards AI as it escalates to a national priority.
đȘ Hardware
Google released sparse details about their TPU v3 chip at IO earlier this year. In this piece, TheNextPlatform
drills down into the design and performance. They note that the âTPU v3 is more of a TPU v2.5 than a new generation of chips because most of the new hardware development appears to be happening at a system level around the TPU v3 chip.â
This blog post is a really neat description of how CPUs, GPUs, and TPUs differ in how they run computations and access memory.
The view has traditionally been that
GAFAMBAT are focused data center workloads, which leaves room for new players to compete at the edge. No more. Google has
announced the Edge TPU that runs small models for rapid inference on IoT devices.
Since 2013,
China held the title of hosting the Worldâs most powerful supercomputer. Now, a team at Oak Ridge National Lab in the US have
unveiled Summit, a supercomputer capable (at peak performance) of 200 petaflops. This makes it 60% faster than the TaihuLight in China. The Summit machine has over 27,000 GPUs (!) from NVIDIA and fills an area the size of two tennis courts. Unsurprisingly, keeping the Summit cool requires quite a feat. It must carry 4,000 gallons of water a minute through its cooling system to carry away about 13 megawatts of heat.
Itâs clear that access to computational resources (namely the GPU) has driven lots of progress in applied machine learning. However, what are the implications of ML hardware on society, governance, surveillance, geopolitics and technological unemployment? In a paper entitled
Computational power and the social impact of artificial intelligence, Tim Hwang of MIT Media Lab digs into these issues. Specifically, he examines how changes in computing architectures, technical methodologies, and supply chains might influence the future of AI. This paper shines a spotlight on how hardware works to exacerbate a range of concerns around ubiquitous surveillance (esp. in China), technological unemployment, and geopolitical conflict. It states that the use of trained models implemented directly on custom ASICs operating at the edge makes potential bugs or biases less easily rectifiable. As such, entities creating and providing such platforms will see their set of responsibilities grow.
Weâve previously explored Chinaâs ambitions to on-shore a significant semiconductor industry due to the vital role it plays in AI progress and national security. The report here states that in 2014 China accounted for
57% of worldwide semiconductor consumption, while in 2015 China possessed
only 6% of the most advanced semiconductor fabrication companies globally. To narrow this gap, the total volume of transactions of Chinaâs semiconductor overseas completed M&A deals exceeded$11B. One of the reasons this is a particularly touchy issue for the US is because American chip companies such as NVIDIA depend on the manufacturing capability of a Chinese neighbor, Taiwan.
More here.
Facebook continued its AI hardware team build-up by hiring Shahriar Rabii as VP and Head of Silicon. Rabii previously worked at Google, where he (according to LinkedIn) âheaded and scaled silicon engineering, product/program management, production and Technology Engineering. He released many products to mass production including Pixel Visual Core for ML and computational photography, Titan family of secure elements, VP9 and AV1 video transcoders and othersâ.
Intel has been working on a new chip architecture that moves them away from x86 and their general purpose processors. This architecture, termed
Configurable Spatial Accelerator, is a dataflow engine (not a serial processor or vector coprocessor) that can work directly on the graphs that programs create before they are compiled down to CPUs in a traditional sense. In this way, the design is inspired by Graphcoreâs Intelligence Processing Unit. Intel is developing the CSA in conjunction with the Department of Defense.
đ„ Healthcare
Making the cover of Nature Medicine,
DeepMind and Londonâs Moorfields Eye Hospital published the results from their study predicting eye disease from routine OCT clinical scans (
paper here). Whatâs notable about this work is that it is designed to integrate into existing clinical pathways and required significant data collection, labelling and patient outcome tracking to generate ground truth. The study uses a two-stage deep learning approach. First, a raw 3D OCT scan (of multiple slices) is analysed by a U-Net CNN (
originally proposed by researchers in Freiburg in 2015) to produce a semantic segmentation map of the eye. This segmentation map mimics how an opthamologist first identifies the micro-structures of the eye from an OCT to subsequently figure out whether any structures look particularly abnormal and what to do about it. Using this segmentation map, the authors then train a second neural network to predict the appropriate clinical referral path: urgent care (a doctor must see the patient within days), semi-urgent (weeks), routine or just observation. While the two-stage strategy performs equally well as a single model learned end-to-end from OCT scan to referral pathway prediction, it affords two advantages: 1) clinical interpretability of the segmentation map and 2) an âintermediate representationâ of the OCT scan data that is independent of the device used to generate the scan. This means that if a clinic wants to implement this system, they would need to only retrain the first segmentation network to adjust for peculiarities of the scan creation process. The team is now progressing this work through clinical validation with further results expected next year. Separately, the DeepMind Health team reported early results from their deep learning-based radiotherapy planning system that seeks to accelerate the path from diagnosis to radiotherapy administration at UCL Hospital (
paper here). Here too they use a 3D U-Net architecture and a significant hand-segmented dataset of 21 organs in the head and neck region.
London-based
Kheiron Medical Technologies has
conducted a trial of its deep learning-based mammogram analysis system on 5,000 patients with 1-2 year follow-up and is due to release data demonstrating human level performance on diagnostic assistance tasks. The data is not yet public, but the company is said to have been awarded regulatory approval from European agencies.
The FDA permitted the marketing of a computer-aided detection and diagnosis software designed to
detect wrist fractures in adult patients from 2D X-rays. The software is produced by
Imagen OsteoDetect, a 40-person strong NYC-based startup. The company had submitted two bodies of evidence to the FDA: 1) a retrospective study of 1,000 radiograph images that compared their software against three board certified hand surgeons in detecting and localising wrist fractures (note: 3 human experts sounds pretty small as a comparison), 2) a retrospective study of 24 providers who reviewed 200 patient cases.
On the topic of detecting fractures on X-rays, researchers from the University of Adelaide and Queensland present a model-agnostic interpretability method for
generating textual explanations for deep learning-based X-Ray fracture detection software. They show evidence that doctors prefer the problem location highlights and textual descriptions together rather than either method alone.
đšđł AI in China
Many governments have now published national AI plans and
this living blog post lists resources and summaries that describe them all.
Now, letâs focus on China.
This piece suggests that in contrast to Europe, China is throwing extreme funding behind new companies, heavily promoting local winners and developing a clear industrial policy for the digital sector. Take note!
Tencent,
Alibaba and
JD.com are separately giving brick and mortar retail stores
a technology facelift to boost sales and weave them into their commerce ecosystems. The view is that consumers will no longer draw the difference between online and offline commerce because stores in both worlds will fall under the same umbrella company. Alibaba, for example, has refitted one million mom and pop stores with in-store sensors and analytics in the last year. These stores become part of the Tmall brand and must procure at least $1,500 of goods per month from the Tmall platform. Hereâs a cool walk through of the
in-store experience at an Alibaba concept store.
JD.com, which offers a same-day delivery service across the country as long as an order comes through before 11am, has a multi-modal automation system for warehousing, processing orders packing and delivery (e.g. with
these robots). A JD.com facility can automatically process 200k orders a day. Scale in technology investing is everything; the
cost to get there doesnât matter, claims their CTO.
Abacus news released a
China Internet Report 2018 that is very much worth your time to read. It enforces the view that the US and China are parallel universes with regards to technology, where almost every layer of the stack is owned by local megaplayers. Whatâs more, there is so much innovation and locally-tailored products that are massively successful in China that havenât even been conceived in the US yet.
The story in the media is often about China investing in or attempting to buy US technology companies working in AI. The
opposite happened recently when the US-based programmable logic devices supplier, Xilinx, purchased DeePhi Technology, a Chinese startup (and Xilinx portfolio investment) working on ML solutions using the Xilinx platform.
China has also made several moves over the last few years to deploy its hardware and software solutions for public security use cases in Africa, with Zimbabwe being the
latest point of focus.
đź Where AI is heading next
McKinsey have
published several simulations on the effects of early or late adoption of AI and the resulting economic gains, as well as how AI could widen gaps between various countries. Useful charts inside.
đŹ On research directions
Turing Award winner Judea Pearl and his work on Bayesian networks in the 80s is
profiled in The Atlantic. He believes that
âall the impressive achievements of deep learning amount to just curve fittingâ. To achieve major breakthroughs, Pearl argues that machines must move beyond reasoning by association (curve fitting) towards causal reasoning. This means a machine must genuinely understand the drivers of cause and effect, as well as be able to ask counterfactual questions of a causal relationship. For machines to invoke causal models, Pearl says we must equip machines with a model of the environment: âWithout a model of reality, you cannot expect the machine to behave intelligently in that reality.â Machines must then proactively posit world models and iterate over them with experience. This feels intuitively correct.
In a series of blog posts that caught fire on Twitter, Filip Piekniewski opines on the hype of deep learning and its limitations. In
Part 1 and
Part 2, he argues that achievements in deep learning have come at a great computational expense, but they do not solve key problems of generalisation and robustness. In
Part 3 (worth a read), he suggests that the AI field should be focused on Moravecâs Paradox, which posits that the apparently simplest real world tasks (low-level sensorimotor skills that babies quickly learn) are actually far more complex than we think (and more computationally complex than high level reasoning.
Several groups are embarking in this direction. For example, François Cholletâs talk at RAAIS 2018 offers a pragmatic overview (
YouTube link) on how stronger priors, richer models (both geometric and symbolic) and better evaluation metrics will help us expand the capabilities of todayâs intelligent systems. Furthermore, PROWLER.ioâs work on industrial-grade,
data-efficient decision-making systems that combine the predictive power of probabilistic modelling with the correct optimisation of model-based RL decision-making can help too. Meanwhile, researchers at Google Brain, DeepMind, MIT and Edinburgh explore how to todayâs AI systems could express
combinatorial generalization (arXiv paper), a hallmark of human intelligence, that allows us to construct new inferences, predictions, and behaviors from known building blocks. In particular, they present a general framework for entity- and relation-based reasoningâwhich they term
graph networksâfor unifying and extending existing methods which operate on graphs. They also describe key design principles for building powerful architectures using graph networks as building blocks.
đš On product design
I think weâre still in the very early days of writing best practice for product design and development around the kernel of AI technology. In an excellent piece entitled
Building AI-first products, David Bessis makes this case clearly:
âYouâre building âAI-firstâ when youâre taking AI as the starting point of the design process. Itâs no longer about adding cool AI-powered features, itâs about removing pre-AI legacy features and creating an entirely new, AI-centric product experience.
AI-first products are products that just would not make sense without AIâŠAI-first design is about renegotiating the deal between what humans do and what machines do.â Indeed, â
any AI-first product changes its usersâ life by taking away something that used to be part of their job. Identifying the right something is the most important AI-first product design question.â I think this a good working filter to determine whether a product or company is really AI-first or using a sprinkling of AI to make existing (legacy) functionality a bit better. Whatâs more, he rightly points out that
âthere is no established methodology for building AI-first products.â Indeed, the book on AI-first product management is still being written.
đš On tooling for AI-first products
Lukas Biewald, ex-CEO and co-founder of Figure Eight (the original data labelling company), has set up his second ML tooling business and shares an
insightful piece into why heâs done so. In particular, he writes:
âTen years ago training data was the biggest problem holding back real world machine learning. Today, the biggest pain is a lack of basic software and best practices to manage a completely new style of coding.â For more detail on how software 2.0 (programming a machine to learn rules from data) from software 1.0 (explicitly programming rules into a machine), watch Andrej Karpathyâs talk on
Building the software 2.0 stack and Chris RĂ© talk at RAAIS 2018 on
Software 2.0.
Finally, Françoit Chollet of Google Brain
published a widely shared and valuable list of learnings on software development, API design and careers.