A Sofa Stuffed With Cash.

Cinema de Laure.

1. DeepMind:

Game-playing artificial intelligence (AI) systems have advanced to a new frontier. Stratego, the classic board game that’s more complex than chess and Go, and craftier than poker, has now been mastered. Published in Science, we present DeepNash, an AI agent that learned the game from scratch to a human expert level by playing against itself. 

DeepNash uses a novel approach, based on game theory and model-free deep reinforcement learning. Its play style converges to a Nash equilibrium, which means its play is very hard for an opponent to exploit. So hard, in fact, that DeepNash has reached an all-time top-three ranking among human experts on the world’s biggest online Stratego platform, Gravon. (Sources: deepmind.com, science.org)

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2. In 2013, researchers at Oxford published an analysis of the jobs most likely to be threatened by automation and artificial intelligence. At the top of the list were occupations such as telemarketing, hand sewing, and brokerage clerking. These and other at-risk jobs involved doing repetitive and unimaginative work, which seemed to make them easy pickings for AI. In contrast, the jobs deemed most resilient to disruption included many artistic professions, such as illustrating and writing. This year, we’ve seen a flurry of AI products that seem to do precisely what the Oxford researchers considered nearly impossible: mimic creativity. Language-learning models such as GPT-3 now answer questions and write articles with astonishingly humanlike precision and flair. Image-generators such as DALL-E 2 transform text prompts into gorgeous—or, if you’d prefer, hideously tacky—images. AI already plays a crucial, if often invisible, role in our digital lives. But this new crop of generative AI technologies seems to possess qualities that are more indelibly human. Call it creative synthesis—the uncanny ability to channel ideas, information, and artistic influences to produce original work. Articles and visual art are just the beginning. (Source: theatlantic.com)

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