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By Jennifer Conrad | 09.07.21   | Electric-car company Tesla recently revealed details of a custom silicon chip called D1, which it intends to use for training the machine-learning algorithm behind its Autopilot self-driving system. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said at a recent event that squeezing more performance out of the computer system used to train the company's neural network will be key to progress in autonomous driving, Will Knight writes. Many car companies use neural networks to identify objects on the road, but Tesla is relying more heavily on the technology, with a single giant neural network known as a "transformer" receiving input from all of a Tesla vehicle's eight cameras at once. And unlike many self-driving-car companies, Tesla does not use lidar, a more expensive kind of sensor that sees the world in 3D. Let the Chips Fall Where They May Tesla joins a growing number of non-chip companies invested in AI that are designing their own chips. They're all betting that future breakthroughs will require expensive custom silicon. Read more about Tesla's latest move into custom chips. |  | Grammy-nominated musician BT, a pioneer at the intersection of music and tech, has produced and written for the likes of David Bowie, Madonna, and the Roots. This spring, he released GENESIS.JSON, a piece of software that contains 24 hours of original music and visual art. It's an adaptive composition that changes throughout the day—and lives on the blockchain. AI could also redefine what it means to be an artist. "We can take the sum total of the artists' output and we can take their artistic works and we can quantify the entire thing into a training set, a massive, multivariable training set," BT tells C. Brandon Ogbunu in a conversation about art as a form of big data. In BT's vision, someone would pay a fee to the rights owner, let's say the estate of Prince. Then an AI could use Prince's catalog as a training set to generate new music. "It would augment the artist's availability and would be a completely revolutionary income stream for artists," BT says. The Future of Music? "I'm both excited and have incredible trepidation about this space that we're expanding into," BT says. Read the conversation on art in the age of algorithms. | | Imagine Lagos, Nigeria, in 2041. Amaka, a brilliant video producer, donned a mask to slip past the facial-recognition cameras that strictly control migration into the capital city. Amaka created a deepfake, "White Vampire Boy Attacks Homeless People in Lagos," which racked up millions of views before being removed from the internet. Now a shady political group intends to coerce Amaka into working for them by showing him another deepfake, this one depicting Amaka in a compromising position. All-Seeing AI That vision of Lagos comes from AI 2041, a new book in which science fiction writer Chen Qiufan lays out 10 scenarios set 20 years from now. Coauthor Kai-Fu Lee, CEO of Sinovation Ventures and former president of Google China, offers technical explanations. Read an excerpt from AI 2041. | |
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