More interesting things in robotics this week
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Humans aren’t overpopulated. We’re aging and shrinking via Big Think
The success of self-driving vehicles will depend on teleoperation via VentureBeat
Biological Robots May Soon Build You a Better Heart via Bloomberg
Janelle Shane on the Weirdness of AI via Skynet Today
Retrocausal and Opteran Technologies are 2021 winners of Embedded Vision Summit Startup Competition
From Jonathan Vanian at Fortune:
Former United States chief technology officer Michael Kratsios has joined the startup Scale AI as managing director and head of strategy, The Wall Street Journal reported. Scale AI, which specializes labelling data used to train A.I. systems, recently raised $325 million and is privately valued at $7.3 billion.
A new A.I. company hits the market. The A.I. startup Anthropic has raised $124 million and plans to create “generally applicable AI technology” that can be used in many different industries, The Financial Times reported. The startup is led by Dario Amodei, a former head of safety at the high-profile A.I. research firm OpenAI. Several OpenAI researchers who worked on the firm’s popular GPT-3 language model joined Anthropic. Former Google chief Eric Schmidt, and Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz also invested in the company, the report said.
How Amazon is tackling the AI talent crunch. Amazon, like other tech giants, is desperately hunting for workers who have an expertise in artificial intelligence.
The online retailer has many businesses—its core e-commerce division, the Alexa voice-activated digital service, and the AWS cloud computing unit—that depend on machine learning. But there are relatively few computer scientists who know the technology, and those who do are in high demand.
One way Amazon has adapted to the tight labor market is to require potential new programming hires to take classes in machine learning, said Bratin Saha, a vice president and general manager of machine learning services at Amazon. The company’s executives believe they can teach these developers machine learning basics over a few weeks so that they can work on more cutting-edge projects after they’re hired.
It’s a strategy that many companies can emulate—and many have. Online education company Udacity, for instance, offers courses that companies can use to train managers in A.I. basics.
Some of Amazon’s coursework involves teaching developers Python, a programming language used widely by machine learning experts. The courses also teach rudimentary machine learning concepts including statistical regression methods that are used for tasks like predicting product prices over time. Another area of focus is deep learning, in which researchers train neural networks—or software that learns—to automatically translate languages.
These are not formal college courses, and Saha said the recruits aren’t graded like they would be in school. Instead, the courses are intended to give new developers a foundation in machine learning and statistics so they can understand the theoretical underpinnings.
If coders don’t understand how machine learning works, they are less likely to create usable A.I. products or troubleshoot related problems.
Eventually, to show they understand machine learning concepts, Saha said new coding recruits are asked to create a recommendation system or a forecasting model. He didn’t say what happens if they fail the challenge, but he said that Amazon has “a pretty good interview process,” implying that the company weeds out underachievers early in the interview process—before they take the classes.
As for other companies recruiting A.I. talent, Saha said he recommends managers tell prospective candidates will have a big impact on the company’s products. Making prospective hires feel valued at work instead of unnoticed is key.
And despite the shortage of A.I. talent, Saha said that college students seem to be increasingly enrolling in A.I. courses. So there is some hope that companies will eventually have a bigger pool of A.I. recruits to choose from.
Jonathan Vanian @JonathanVanian jonathan.vanian@fortune.com
This morning I took part in the first panel at the BSI conference The Digital World: Artificial Intelligence. The subject of the panel was AI Governance and Ethics. My co-panelist was Emma Carmel, and we were expertly chaired by Katherine Holden....