Vodafone and Google launch AI Booster platform

A new platform launched by Vodafone and Google called AI Booster aims to handle thousands of ML models a day across 18+ countries.

AI Booster is the result of 18 months of development and is built upon Google’s Vertex AI and integrates with Vodafone’s Neuron platform.

Vertex AI, among other Google technologies, had not been officially announced when Vodafone started development on AI Booster.

Cornelia Schaurecker, Global Group Director for Big Data & AI...

6 July 2022 | Companies

Google places engineer on leave after claim LaMDA is ‘sentient’

Google has placed one of its engineers on leave after claiming the company’s LaMDA chatbot is “sentient”.

The engineer in question, Blake Lemoine, is part of Google’s Responsible AI division. In a Washington Post article posted over the weekend, Lemoine said that he believes LaMDA has achieved sentience.

Here’s an excerpt from one conversation between Lemoine and LaMDA:

Lemoine: So let's start with the basics. Do you...

13 June 2022 | Artificial Intelligence

Google employs ML to make Chrome more secure and enjoyable

Google has explained how machine learning is helping to make Chrome more secure and enjoyable.

Starting with security, Google says that its latest machine learning (ML) model has enabled Chrome to detect over twice as many phishing attacks and malicious sites.

The new on-device machine learning model was rolled out in March. Since its rollout, Google claims that Chrome has detected 2.5x more threats.

Beyond security, Google is also preparing to use machine...

10 June 2022 | Google

Google no longer accepts deepfake projects on Colab

Google has added “creating deepfakes” to its list of projects that are banned from its Colab service.

Colab is a product from Google Research that enables AI researchers, data scientists, or students to write and execute Python in their browsers.

With little fanfare, Google added deepfakes to its list of banned projects.

Deepfakes use generative neural network architectures – such as autoencoders or generative adversarial networks (GANs) – to manipulate...

31 May 2022 | Deep & Reinforcement Learning

Apple’s former ML director reportedly joins Google DeepMind

A machine learning exec who left Apple due to its return-to-office policy has reportedly joined Google DeepMind. 

Ian Goodfellow is a renowned machine learning researcher. Goodfellow invented generative adversarial networks (GANs), developed a system for Google Maps that transcribes addresses from Street View car photos, and more.

In a departure note to his team at Apple, Goodfellow cited the company’s much-criticised lack of flexibility in its work...

18 May 2022 | Apple

Google picks ASUS IoT to help scale its Coral edge AI platform

Google has picked ASUS IoT to help scale the manufacturing, distribution, and support of its Coral edge AI platform.

Coral was launched in 2019 with the goal of making edge AI more accessible. Google says that it’s witnessed strong demand since its launch – across industries and geographies – and needs a reliable partner able to help it scale.

ASUS IoT is a sub-brand of the wider ASUS brand that has decades of experience in global electronics...

6 May 2022 | Artificial Intelligence

Babylon Health taps Google Cloud to boost scalability and innovation

AI-powered healthcare service Babylon Health has announced a partnership with Google Cloud to boost scalability and innovation.

London-based Babylon Health is a digital-first health service provider that uses AI and machine learning technology to provide access to health information to people whenever and wherever they need it.

The company has partnered with private and public across the UK, North America, South-East Asia, and Rwanda with the aim of making healthcare...

28 March 2022 | Applications

DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman departs Google

DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman has departed Google after an eight-year stint at the company.

Suleyman co-founded AI giant DeepMind alongside Demis Hassabis and Shane Legg in 2010 before it was acquired by Google in 2014 for $500 million.

DeepMind has become somewhat of an AI darling and has repeatedly made headlines for creating neural networks that have beat human capabilities in a range of games. DeepMind’s AlphaGo even beat Go world champion Lee Sedol in a...

21 January 2022 | Companies

Oxford Union invites an AI to debate the ethics of its own existence

DNA Sequencing

The Oxford Union, the debating society of the University of Oxford, invited an artificial intelligence to debate the ethics surrounding its own existence earlier in December. The results? Troubling.

The AI in question was the Megatron Transformer, a supervised learning tool developed by the applied deep research team at NVIDIA, based on earlier work by Google.

Trained on real-world data, the Megatron has knowledge of the whole of Wikipedia, 63 million English news...

16 December 2021 | Artificial Intelligence

DeepMind sees revenue jump and turns first ever profit

Chess Game

DeepMind, the Alphabet-owned AI research lab, has turned a profit for the first time since the company was founded in 2010.

The London-based firm recorded a profit of £43.8 million in 2020 with revenue at £826 million, according to its annual results filing with Companies House.

In previous years, DeepMind have posted losses well into the hundreds of millions that Alphabet has heavily subsidised. For example, the company lost £476 million in 2019 and has made...

7 October 2021 | Companies