GPT-2’s staged release, Microsoft’s billion, a face-recognition ban

Frontier research collided with questions of release, money, and law. OpenAI announced GPT-2 in February but held back the full model for nine months, citing the risk of misuse; it restructured as a capped-profit company in March and took $1 billion from Microsoft in July. DeepMind’s AlphaStar and OpenAI Five beat professionals at StarCraft II and Dota 2. Governments began to answer: the European Commission published ethics guidelines, San Francisco became the first major American city to bar government use of facial recognition, and California outlawed deceptive election deepfakes after an altered video of Nancy Pelosi spread. The Turing Award went to three pioneers of deep learning.

13 entries recorded

November

  1. OpenAI releases the full 1.5-billion-parameter GPT-2

    OpenAI published the full 1.5-billion-parameter GPT-2 model and its code on 5 November 2019, completing the staged rollout begun in February. The company said it had found no strong evidence of misuse of the smaller versions released earlier.

October

  1. California bans deceptive deepfakes near elections

    Governor Gavin Newsom signed AB 730 on 3 October 2019, barring distribution of materially deceptive audio or video of a candidate within 60 days of an election where a reasonable viewer would be misled, unless the media is clearly labeled as manipulated.

July

  1. FTC fines Facebook $5 billion over privacy violations

    The Federal Trade Commission announced on 24 July 2019 that Facebook would pay what it called a record-breaking $5 billion penalty and submit to new privacy restrictions and a modified corporate structure, settling the inquiry opened after the Cambridge Analytica disclosures.

  2. Microsoft invests $1 billion in OpenAI

    Microsoft and OpenAI announced a multiyear partnership on 22 July 2019 under which Microsoft would invest $1 billion, paid in installments, and become OpenAI’s exclusive cloud provider. The companies said they would jointly build AI supercomputing systems on Azure.

June

  1. Altered Pelosi video draws Congress to manipulated media

    A video of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, slowed to make her sound impaired, spread on Facebook and Twitter after a 22 May 2019 speech and was shared by President Trump. YouTube took it down; Facebook limited its reach and left it up. The House Intelligence Committee then held a hearing.

May

  1. San Francisco bans city use of facial recognition

    The San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted 8-1 on 14 May 2019 for the Stop Secret Surveillance ordinance, barring city departments including the police from using facial recognition and requiring board approval before other surveillance tools are acquired.

April

  1. OpenAI Five defeats the Dota 2 world champions OG

    OpenAI Five, a team of five neural networks trained by reinforcement learning, beat OG, the reigning Dota 2 world champions, 2-0 at a public event in San Francisco on 13 April 2019. OpenAI said the system had played the equivalent of about 45,000 years of the game in ten months.

  2. European Commission publishes AI ethics guidelines

    The European Commission’s high-level expert group published Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI on 8 April 2019, setting out four principles and seven requirements, among them human oversight, privacy, transparency, and accountability. The guidelines were voluntary.

March

  1. Turing Award goes to Bengio, Hinton, and LeCun

    The Association for Computing Machinery named Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, and Yann LeCun recipients of the 2018 A.M. Turing Award on 27 March 2019, for the work that made deep neural networks a central component of computing. The prize carries $1 million, funded by Google.

  2. OpenAI restructures as the capped-profit OpenAI LP

    OpenAI said on 11 March 2019 that it had created OpenAI LP, a capped-profit company controlled by its original nonprofit board, in order to raise investment. Returns to first-round investors were capped, with profit beyond the cap passing to the nonprofit.

February

  1. OpenAI unveils GPT-2 and withholds the full model

    OpenAI announced GPT-2 on 14 February 2019 with samples of coherent multi-paragraph text, and published only a 124-million-parameter version rather than the full 1.5-billion-parameter model, citing concerns about malicious use. It called the plan a staged release.

  2. This Person Does Not Exist puts synthetic faces online

    The engineer Phillip Wang launched thispersondoesnotexist.com in February 2019, a page that draws a new photorealistic face of a person who does not exist on every load, using NVIDIA’s StyleGAN. It drew roughly 8 million visitors in its first weeks.

January

  1. AlphaStar defeats professional StarCraft II players

    DeepMind said on 24 January 2019 that its AlphaStar system had beaten the professional StarCraft II players Dario Wünsch and Grzegorz Komincz, winning 10 of 11 games played under professional conditions in December 2018. It was trained by league play among versions of itself.