07.02.17 Recap

Elon Musk thinks he can make getting to Mars cheaper than going to college

And the Boring Company is in talks with LA

...annnd has apparently started to bore

Lots happening in 🚗  the past few weeks...

Texas explicitly allows driverless car tests

Alphabet Inks Deal for Avis to Manage Self-Driving Car Fleet

Apple Is Working With Hertz to Manage Its Self-Driving Car Fleet

Tesla hires deep learning expert Andrej Karpathy to lead Autopilot vision

Tesla’s New AI Guru Could Help Its Cars Teach Themselves

Ford’s on-demand bus service Chariot expands to Seattle

Waymo’s self-driving van hits the desert to see if it can stand the heat

And plenty of other happenings + thoughts...

Hard Questions: How We Counter Terrorism from Facebook

The Human Rights of Women Entrepreneurs

The Internet Doesn’t Have to Be Bad for Democracy

Mark Zuckerberg explains why he just changed Facebook's mission

MIT CSAIL research offers a fully automated way to peer inside neural nets

Ex Machina’s Scientific Advisor – Murray Shanahan

Bezos's Grocery 'Waterloo' Is Now His Biggest Opportunity

In a few years, no investors are going to be looking for AI startups

Forget AlphaGo—DeepMind Has a More Interesting Step Toward General AI

Google advances AI with ‘one model to learn them all

Accenture, Microsoft team up on blockchain-based digital ID network

The Man Who Helped Turn Toronto Into a High-Tech Hotbed

A leading Silicon Valley engineer explains why every tech worker needs a humanities education

You can now sign up for early access to Google’s wacky Area 120 app experiments

How HBO’s Silicon Valley built “Not Hotdog” with mobile TensorFlow, Keras & React Native 🌭

Why Are Corporations So Bad At Working With Startups?

Your Apple Pay purchases can help preserve national parks
Awesome to see Apple step up and help preserve our national treasures 💪

 

06.04.17 Recap

It Could Be 10 Times Cheaper To Take Electric Robo-Taxis Than To Own A Car By 2030

“Is this going to destroy the company? If not, let them test it.”
Love that ethos.  💯   [Also, Reid's @MastersOfScale is pretty great]

Delphi joins self-driving alliance with BMW, Intel

Mossberg: The Disappearing Computer

OpenAI Baselines: DQN

As Profit Dwindles, Ford Is Said to Replace Its C.E.O. with its director of autonomous vehicle research

Self-driving car technology: When will the robots hit the road?

Toyota pushes into blockchain tech to enable the next generation of cars

Zuckerberg Asks Harvard Grads to Fight Isolationism, Nationalism

The Unbundling Of Excel
☝️  I've been hot on this trend for awhile now

This is Jupiter? Giant planet surprises scientists in Juno’s first flyby

China's GSR Nears $1 Billion Deal for Nissan Battery Unit

AlphaGo retires from competitive Go after defeating world number one 3-0

Zillow announces $1M prize for anyone who can improve the algorithm for its Zestimate
Always like to see these open innovation challenges 🙌

When the Patient Is a Gold Mine: The Trouble With Rare-Disease Drugs

Faraday Future Said to Plan $1 Billion Raising as Main Backer Struggles

Facebook to launch ParlAI, a testing ground for AI and bots

Why Google’s CEO Is Excited About Automating Artificial Intelligence

Apple Is Working on a Dedicated Chip to Power AI on Devices

How AI Startups Must Compete with Google

Is China Outsmarting America in A.I.?

I trained a Word2Vec model on FoxNews broadcasts:  This is what it thinks about the world.

 

04.23.17 Recap

Tesla Semi truck unveil set for September

VW to build a ‘nationwide 150 kW+ fast charging network’ for electric vehicles as part of Dieselgate settlement

Apple Said to Near Road Tests of Self-Driving Car Software

Copy that -- Apple just received a permit to test self-driving cars in California

Bezos on the Future of Amazon the company's annual report (hint:  lots of AI)

And now, a brief feature on Facebook who's receiving a lot of love this time around...

Facebook outlines how it is going to fight misinformation and fake news, amongst other things in it's Information Operations at Facebook report

Facebook's Building8 working on brain-computer interface technology
I mentioned this tech a few weeks back when Neuralink formally popped up. Very fascinating tech. Oh, and they got the former head of DARPA to oversee things.

Facebook owns four out of the five most downloaded apps worldwide (wow, that's strong 💪)

So is this - Facebook Gives Staff Green Light to Join May 1 Political Protests

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory to boost sharing of global scientific research in collaboration with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (aka bioRxiv)
[Side note:  really awesome to see Mark's commitment to the Chan Zuckerberg initiative]

And back to our regularly schedule programming...

Princeton’s Ad-Blocking Superweapon May Put an End to the Ad-Blocking Arms Race
☝️ What's cool about this is the information literacy component -- that is, highlighting ads not just censoring. You know, teach a (wo)man to fish and what not. Similar approaches could be expanded to other use cases.

Tesla unveils its new ‘sleek and low-profile’ exclusive solar panel made by Panasonic

This Week In Statups: Stripe Patrick Collison on online payment pwrhouse, Atlas, public/private mkts, & GDP of net (again, huge fan of the Atlas)

Speaking of Stripe - Susan Fowler to lead Stripe’s new engineering tips publication

The Dark Secret at the Heart of AI

Facebook’s Perfect, Impossible Chatbot

CommAI: Evaluating the First Steps Towards a Useful General AI

Live Office Hours with Yuri Sagalov and Sam Altman

Toyota unveils plans to build a fleet of heavy-duty, hydrogen-powered trucks

 

01.29.17 Recap

AI Software Learns to Make AI Software by Tom Simonite
So meta.

The Story of My Life by Ivan Rodriguez
Inspirational read from one of my all time favorite players reflecting on his career as he is admitted into the MLB Hall of Fame. Congrats Pudge!!

Four Questions for Geoff Hinton by Bryon Reese and Geoff Hinton

arxivML: An Alexa skill to read latest machine learning papers from arXiv by Amine Ben Khalifa
Alexa and arxivML, a match made in heaven.

Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layer by Google Brain, et al

Repealing the ACA without a Replacement -- The Risks to American Health Care by Pres. Barack Obama
It's true you never really know what you've got 'til it's gone...

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09.04.16 Recap

How Tech Giants are Devising Real Ethics for Artificial Intelligence by John Markoff
Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft are coming together to form an industry group focused on the creation of a standard of ethics around artificial intelligence. The group's aims will be to be to ensure that AI research is focused on benefiting people, not hurting them.

One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence (AI100) by Stanford + Co. (thx Eric Horvitz)
A consortium of researchers released a report out of Stanford University that details the impact of artificial intelligence on society. The brainchild of Eric Horvitz, a computer scientist at Microsoft Research and Stanford alum, the group includes a host of leading academicians and talented contributors. Certainly an interesting read and, incidentally, the inspiration for the industry group noted earlier ☝️ .

The Next Big Shift in SaaS by Tomasz Tunguz
In addition to sharing his thoughts on the workflow of the future, which I shared a week or so ago, Tomasz discusses how SaaS applications can move from being displacers to disruptors. I had a recent conversation that arrived at a similar conclusion. Doing some reading after the fact led me to this post from July. A timely read, despite the delay.

First Round Capital's FAQs from First Round Capital
First Round Capital opens up their playbook to provide more insight into what they're looking for in new investments, their process, and how they make decisions. Great to see this type of increased transparency in the venture space. ICYMI - Bloomberg Beta recently open sourced their manual, too.

Facebook AI Research open sourcing tools
FAIR is releasing some of Facebook's tools including fastText for text classification and DeepMask, SharpMask, and MultiPathNet which are used to understand objects in photos...

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08.21.16 Recap

Machine Intelligence 2.0 in charts and graphs by Shivon Zilis and VentureBeat
Nice general overview of the ML/AI landscape aptly dubbed here as Machine Intelligence 2.0.

Event Driven SaaS - The Workflow Of The Future by Tomasz Tunguz
Outlines how a new wave of SaaS products, if properly designed, can mitigate / eliminate the agency problem of classic software by benefiting users directly. I am personally a big fan of this play. By offering value to the people actually using the product from day to day -- not just the executives -- products can generate buy-in through accruing benefit. This, in turn, creates both stickiness for the product and the ability to generate even more value through increased data capture and engagement.

What’s the Difference Between Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning? by Michael Copeland and NVIDIA
In case you were wondering, NVIDIA spells it out for you in a thoughtful post (and Part One of their series on the fundamentals of deep learning).

Human collective intelligence as distributed Bayesian inference by Peter Krafft, et al
Awesome new study finding that a cognitive decision mechanism can treat a variable as a prior distribution upon which to base decisions...

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