Google creates new AI division to challenge OpenAI

Google has consolidated its AI research labs, Google Brain and DeepMind, into a new unit named Google DeepMind.

The move is seen as a strategic way for Google to maintain its edge in the competitive AI industry and compete with OpenAI. By combining the talent and resources of both entities, Google DeepMind aims to accelerate AI advancements while maintaining ethical standards.

The new unit will be responsible for spearheading groundbreaking AI products and advancements,...

21 April 2023 | Artificial Intelligence

Demand for AI expertise surges by 1,000%

Fiverr has released its seventh Business Trends Index, revealing a surge in demand for AI expertise.

The ongoing skills shortage is making it difficult for businesses to attract, and retain, tech industry talent. AI expertise is particularly in-demand.

Among the sectors that have seen the biggest increase on Fiverr’s platform include ‘Accounting and Finance’ services, which has seen an 835 percent increase over the past six months—showing a clear demand for AI...

18 April 2023 | Artificial Intelligence

AI professionals seek job flexibility and stability over exciting perks

Research suggests that AI professionals looking for a new job prioritise flexibility and stability over exciting perks.

Despite recent high-profile layoffs, the wider talent shortage is ongoing. Organisations looking to attract, or retain, the best candidates are offering numerous unique benefits.

However, research from BenchSci finds that AI, machine learning, and data professionals are mostly looking for flexibility and stability in their future...

20 March 2023 | Enterprise

£370m plan launched to turn UK into ‘tech superpower’

A pile of Sterling notes.

The Prime Minister and Technology Secretary have unveiled the Government’s plan to cement the UK’s place as a science and technology superpower by 2030, alongside a raft of new measures backed by over £370 million to boost investment in innovation, bring the world’s best talent to the UK, and seize the potential of ground-breaking new technologies like AI.

The new Science and Technology Framework is the first major piece of work from the newly created Department...

6 March 2023 | Artificial Intelligence

Omdia: AI chip startups to have a tough year

Analysts from Omdia expect AI chip startups to have a difficult year.

Omdia’s Top AI Hardware Startups Market Radar finds that over 100 venture capitalists invested over $6 billion into the top 25 AI chip startups since 2018. However, it seems the good times weren’t to last.

The global chip shortage is becoming an inventory crisis. Meanwhile, the economic downturn and difficult monetary policies have made it difficult to raise funding.

“The best-funded AI...

21 February 2023 | Artificial Intelligence

Developers using AI help often produce buggier code

A study by Stanford University computer scientists has found that developers using AI-powered assistants often produce buggier code.

The paper, titled ‘Do Users Write More Insecure Code with AI Assistants?’, examines developers’ use of AI coding assistants like the controversial GitHub Copilot.

“Participants with access to an AI assistant often produced more security vulnerabilities than those without access, with particularly significant results for string...

21 December 2022 | Applications

State of AI 2022: Adoption plateaus but leaders increase gap

According to McKinsey’s latest State of AI report, leaders are pulling ahead but overall adoption is plateauing.

McKinsey notes that organisations that report using AI in at least one business area have more than doubled since 2017.

The most significant jump in adoption was between 2017 (20%) and 2018 (47%). A peak was reached in 2019 (58%) but has since tailed off to 50% in 2022.

Considering the plateau includes the pandemic years – when businesses were...

7 December 2022 | Applications

Omdia: The chatbot market will remain healthily diverse

Omdia analysts have assessed that the chatbot market will remain “served by a robust, diverse ecosystem of vendors”.

The report highlights that it’s contrary to the assessment of vendor assessments and traditional technology market trends.

Mark Beccue, Principal Analyst at Omdia, commented:

“There are several reasons for a robust chatbot solutions market.

One, there is persistent market demand for solutions which address a broad spectrum of...

12 October 2022 | Artificial Intelligence

OpenAI’s GPT-3 is a convincing philosopher

A study has found that OpenAI’s GPT-3 is capable of being indistinguishable from a human philosopher.

The now infamous GPT-3 is a powerful autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text.

Eric Schwitzgebel, Anna Strasser, and Matthew Crosby set out to find out whether GPT-3 can replicate a human philosopher.

The team “fine-tuned” GPT-3 based on philosopher Daniel Dennet’s corpus. Ten philosophical questions were then...

27 July 2022 | Applications

AI learns how to play Minecraft by watching videos

Minecraft characters.

Open AI has trained a neural network to play Minecraft by Video PreTraining (VPT) on a massive unlabeled video dataset of human Minecraft play, while using just a small amount of labeled contractor data.

With a bit of fine-tuning, the AI research and deployment company is confident that its model can learn to craft diamond tools, a task that usually takes proficient humans over 20 minutes (24,000 actions). Its model uses the native human interface of keypresses and mouse...

29 June 2022 | Artificial Intelligence