Observations

State of AI 2020

Apoorv Upreti -

This is a report put together by two investors on the current state of AI. Slides here.

Highlights:

  • Jobs most at risk of automation (slide): Large decreases in employment expected over the next 3 years in retail, telecom, financial services, consumer packaged goods, travel, transport and logistics.
  • A really impressive image GAN (slide): "SinGAN is an unconditional generative scheme that generates diverse realistic samples beyond textures."
  • AI-based translation of code from C++ to Python (slide): "An unsupervised machine translation model trained on GitHub projects with 1,000 parallel functions can translate 90% of these functions from C++ to Java and 57% of Python functions into C++ and successfully pass unit tests. No expert knowledge required, but no guarantees that the model didn’t memorize the functions either."
  • The costs of training large models is very high (slide): "Based on variables released by Google et al., you’re paying circa $1 per 1,000 parameters. This means OpenAI’s 175B parameter GPT-3 could have cost tens of millions to train. Experts suggest the likely budget was $10M."