—Microsoft has received more attention in recent weeks for two incidents involving teen girls, a state of affairs that has executives in Redmond asking hard questions and making public apologies.
Maybe Microsoft should have more heavily filtered Tay’s responses, or at least devised a way to indicate they were assimilated comments of humans interacting with it, rather than its own inventions, as University of Washington’s Ryan Calo, an expert in AI law, points out in Wired.
Meanwhile, the very human failure in Microsoft’s games division in booking exotic dancers dressed like school girls to mingle with attendees at its Game Developers Conference party in San Francisco earlier this month was arguably worse for a company—and an industry—trying to create a climate more welcoming to women.
—Google is making available some of its machine learning technologies to developers through Cloud Machine Learning. The company will allow developers to use APIs for speech recognition, translation, and computer vision, accessing the same technology at play in the company’s voice search and voice typing products. This underscores the tough competition from technology giants faced by startups aspiring to deliver similar machine learning or AI capabilities as a service.
—Here’s a new resource for those of us trying to keep tabs on machine learning and AI: From Seattle startup Algorithmia comes Emergent Future, a “weekly, hand-curated dispatch exploring technology through the lens of artificial intelligence, data science, and the shape of things to come.” You can sign up for it here.