AI21 Labs raises $64M to help it compete against OpenAI

AI21 Labs has raised $64 million in a funding round to help it compete against OpenAI and other NLP leaders.

Competition in NLP (Natural Language Processing) is heating up. OpenAI is currently seen as the industry leader with its GPT-3 model but rivals are gaining traction.

Investors see AI21 Labs as one of the most promising contenders.

"We completed this round during a period of market uncertainty, which highlights the confidence our investors have in AI21's...

13 July 2022 | Applications

DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman launches new AI venture

DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman has joined two other high-profile industry figures in launching a new venture called Inflection AI.

LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman is joining Suleyman on the venture.

“Reid and I are excited to announce that we are co-founding a new company, Inflection AI,” wrote Suleyman in a statement.

“Inflection will be an AI-first consumer products company, incubated at Greylock, with all the advantages and expertise that come...

9 March 2022 | Artificial Intelligence

Meta claims its new AI supercomputer will set records

Meta (formerly Facebook) has unveiled an AI supercomputer that it claims will be the world’s fastest.

The supercomputer is called the AI Research SuperCluster (RSC) and is yet to be fully complete. However, Meta’s researchers have already begun using it for training large natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision models.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZnykn1tDSE

RSC is set to be fully built in mid-2022. Meta says that it will be the fastest in the...

25 January 2022 | Applications

IBM enhances Watson Discovery’s natural language processing capabilities

IBM has announced enhancements to the natural language processing (NLP) capabilities of Watson Discovery.

Watson Discovery is an AI-powered intelligent search and text-analytics platform that can retrieve critical information buried in enterprise data.

In one case study, Woodside Energy had no way to retrieve the 30 years’ worth of valuable engineering and drilling knowledge that was buried in unstructured documentation. Using the existing NLP capabilities of Watson...

10 November 2021 | Artificial Intelligence

Former NHS surgeon creates AI ‘virtual patient’ for remote training

A former NHS surgeon has created an AI-powered “virtual patient” which helps to keep skills sharp during a time when most in-person training is on hold.

Dr Alex Young is a trained orthopaedic and trauma surgeon who founded Virti and set out to use emerging technologies to provide immersive training for both new healthcare professionals and experienced ones looking to hone their skills.

COVID-19 has put most in-person training on hold to minimise transmission risks....

11 December 2020 | Applications

MIT software shows how NLP systems are snookered by simple synonyms

Here’s an example of how artificial intelligence can still seriously lack behind some human attributes: tests have shown how natural language processing (NLP) systems can be tricked into misunderstanding text by merely swapping one word for a synonym.

A research team at MIT developed software, called TextFooler, which looked for words which were most crucial to an NLP classifier and replaced them. The team offered an example:

“The characters, cast in impossibly...

12 February 2020 | Research

Esteemed consortium launch AI natural language processing benchmark

facebook google deepmind nlp consortium ai artificial intelligence natural language processing

A research consortium featuring some of the greatest minds in AI are launching a benchmark to measure natural language processing (NLP) abilities.

The consortium includes Google DeepMind, Facebook AI, New York University, and the University of Washington. Each of the consortium’s members believe a more comprehensive benchmark is needed for NLP than current solutions.

The result is a benchmarking platform called SuperGLUE which replaces an older platform called GLUE...

15 August 2019 | Google