The year GPT-3 arrived and AlphaFold 2 matched the laboratory

OpenAI published GPT-3, a language model with 175 billion parameters, opened it to developers through a paid API, then licensed it exclusively to Microsoft. DeepMind’s AlphaFold 2 predicted protein structures at the CASP14 competition to an accuracy comparable to laboratory methods, addressing a question that had stood open for about fifty years. Governments began drafting rules: the European Commission published a white paper, and the outgoing United States administration issued an executive order on federal use. Waymo opened driverless rides to the Phoenix public. Amid protests over police violence, IBM, Amazon and Microsoft stepped back from selling face recognition to police, and Google’s dismissal of Timnit Gebru drew wide criticism.

14 entries recorded

December

  1. DeepMind’s MuZero plays Atari, Go, chess and shogi without rules

    Nature published “Mastering Atari, Go, chess and shogi by planning with a learned model” on 23 December 2020. Julian Schrittwieser and colleagues at DeepMind described MuZero, which planned using a model it learned rather than rules it was given.

  2. Trump signs an executive order on federal use of AI

    President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 13960, on trustworthy artificial intelligence in the federal government, on 3 December 2020. It set nine principles for agencies’ non-defense use of AI and told them to inventory their AI use cases.

  3. Google fires Timnit Gebru after a dispute over an ethics paper

    Timnit Gebru, co-lead of Google’s Ethical AI team, said on 2 December 2020 that Google had forced her out over a paper it asked her to retract. Google said it accepted a resignation; Gebru said she had threatened to resign and was never given that choice.

November

  1. AlphaFold 2 nears laboratory accuracy at CASP14

    Organizers of the fourteenth Critical Assessment of protein Structure Prediction said on 30 November 2020 that DeepMind’s AlphaFold 2 had predicted about two-thirds of the competition’s target proteins to an accuracy comparable to laboratory methods.

  2. Apple unveils M1, its first Mac chip with a Neural Engine

    Apple introduced the M1 at a virtual event on 10 November 2020, its first custom silicon for the Mac, in a new MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro and Mac mini. Apple said its 16-core Neural Engine runs 11 trillion operations per second.

October

  1. Tesla sends Full Self-Driving Beta to a small group of drivers

    Tesla began sending a Full Self-Driving beta update on 20 October 2020 to a small group of drivers it called expert and careful, adding city-street steering, turns and lane selection to existing highway Autopilot features.

  2. Waymo opens driverless robotaxi rides to the Phoenix public

    Waymo opened fully driverless Waymo One rides, with no human safety driver, to the general public in the Phoenix metropolitan area on 8 October 2020, starting with existing riders and widening access through its app over the following weeks.

September

  1. Microsoft licenses GPT-3 exclusively from OpenAI

    Microsoft announced a multiyear agreement on 22 September 2020 to license GPT-3 exclusively, letting it embed the model in its own products while OpenAI continued to sell GPT-3 to other customers through its own API. Azure already hosted OpenAI’s training supercomputer.

  2. Nvidia agrees to buy Arm from SoftBank for $40 billion

    Nvidia and SoftBank Group announced on 13 September 2020 a definitive agreement for Nvidia to buy the chip designer Arm for about $40 billion in cash and stock. Nvidia said it would keep Arm’s licensing model and build a research center in Cambridge, England.

August

  1. DeepMind releases AlphaFold predictions for coronavirus proteins

    DeepMind used AlphaFold to predict the shapes of several under-studied SARS-CoV-2 proteins, among them the membrane protein, Nsp2, Nsp4, Nsp6 and the papain-like proteinase, and released them under an open license as computational predictions rather than verified structures.

June

  1. OpenAI opens GPT-3 to developers through a private API beta

    OpenAI opened a commercial API on 11 June 2020 giving developers access to GPT-3 for what it called virtually any English language task. The private beta included about a dozen partner companies, among them Algolia, Quizlet, and Reddit.

  2. IBM, Amazon and Microsoft step back from police face recognition

    IBM said on 8 June 2020 that it would stop selling facial recognition. Amazon announced a one-year moratorium on police use of Rekognition on 10 June, and Microsoft said on 11 June it would not sell the technology to US police until a national law governed it.

May

  1. OpenAI publishes GPT-3, a 175-billion-parameter language model

    OpenAI researchers led by Tom B. Brown posted “Language Models are Few-Shot Learners” to arXiv on 28 May 2020. It described GPT-3, an autoregressive language model with 175 billion parameters, ten times larger than any prior non-sparse model.

February

  1. European Commission publishes a white paper on AI

    The European Commission published “White Paper on Artificial Intelligence: a European approach to excellence and trust” on 19 February 2020, alongside a report on safety and liability and a European data strategy. A public consultation ran to June.