The UK Government has invested $28 million in several high-tech farming projects, which are aimed at cutting down pollution, minimizing waste and producing more food. The investment is part of the Government's modern Industrial Strategy, for which the UK has committed to boost R&D spending to 2.4 percent of GDP by 2027. The projects include Warwickshire-based Rootwave, which will use a $875,000 grant to use electricity instead of chemicals to kill weeds from the roots, avoiding damage to crops. Tuberscan, in Lincolnshire, will use $496,000 to develop ground penetrating radar, underground scans and artificial intelligence (AI) to monitor potato crops and identify when they are ready to harvest. The government hopes the technology will increase the usable crop by an estimated 5 to 10%, as well as reducing food waste with minimal additional costs.

We developed four variants of the model, ranging in size from small (124 million parameters) to large ( 1.5 billion parameters). We chose a staged release process, releasing the smallest model in February, but withholding larger models due to concerns about the potential for misuse, such as generating fake news content, impersonating others in email, or automating abusive social media content production [ 46 ]. We released the next model size in May as part of a staged release process. We are now releasing our 774 million parameter model. While large language models' flexibility and generative capabilities raise misuse concerns, they also have a range of beneficial uses - they can assist in prose, poetry, and programming; analyze dataset biases; and more.

With glass interior walls, exposed plumbing and a staff of young researchers dressed like Urban Outfitters models, New York University's AI Now Institute could easily be mistaken for the offices of any one of New York's innumerable tech startups. For many of those small companies (and quite a few larger ones) the objective is straightforward: leverage new advances in computing, especially artificial intelligence (AI), to disrupt industries from social networking to medical research. But for Meredith Whittaker and Kate Crawford, who co-founded AI Now together in 2017, it's that disruption itself that's under scrutiny. They are two of many experts who are working to ensure that, as corporations, entrepreneurs and governments roll out new AI applications, they do so in a way that's ethically sound. "These tools are now impacting so many parts of our everyday life, from healthcare to criminal justice to education to hiring, and it's happening simultaneously," says Crawford.

Scientists have created a robot that may be able to help the elderly perform tasks amid a shortage of nurses in the UK. Named Baxter, it has two arms and 3D printed'fingers', allowing it to step in when a person is struggling with things such as getting dressed. Artificial intelligence allows the robot to detect when assistance is needed and learn about the owners difficulties over time. When it's ready for use in healthcare settings, it could help free up the time of staff so they can do other work. There are around 40,000 nurse vacancies in NHS England, which is expected to double after Brexit, according to figures. Scientists have created a robot named Baxter that can help the elderly perform tasks amid a national nurse shortage.

The UK government has developed a voracious appetite for artificial intelligence (AI), based on a promise of its apparently transformative power across myriad industries. From prime minister Boris Johnson's pledge to fund a £250m AI lab for the NHS, to the Department for Education's recently launched'AI horizon scanning group', AI is being lauded as a panacea to some of the most pressing issues society faces. Education is just one of the sectors that is meeting AI with open arms. As Matthew Jones at Perlego argued for this title, the opportunities being presented for AI to close educational accessibility gaps is exciting. In fact, educators, policymakers and investors are all being bombarded with messages related to AI's seemingly endless benefits in the classroom.

There are more than 1.9 billion users logged in to YouTube every single month who watch over a billion hours of video every day. With this number of users, activity, and content, it makes sense for YouTube to take advantage of the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to help operations. Here are a few ways YouTube, owned by Google, uses artificial intelligence today. In the first quarter of this year, 8.3 million videos were removed from YouTube, and 76% were automatically identified and flagged by artificial intelligence classifiers. More than 70% of these were identified before there were any views by users.

Perspecta Inc. announced that its innovative applied research arm, Perspecta Labs, was awarded a prime contract from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to provide Photonic Edge AI Compact Hardware (PEACH) research under DARPA's Artificial Intelligence (AI) Exploration program. The contract, which represents new work for the company, has a total value of $1 million and work will be performed over 18 months. The goal of the PEACH program is to research and develop novel AI processing architectures in combination with innovative photonic hardware to enable breakthrough AI functionality with significant reduction in hardware complexity, latency and power consumption. Perspecta Labs will create a novel multiple-loop, delay-line reservoir computing architecture, an algorithm for specific emitter identification, and a scalable prototype hardware design in combination with innovative photonic hardware. "Perspecta Labs will draw on its rich portfolio of research and development in AI, photonics, radio frequency (RF) analytics, and systems engineering to deliver this work," said Petros Mouchtaris, Ph.D., president of Perspecta Labs.

A Palestinian man uses a biometric gate as he crosses into Israel at the Qalandia crossing in Jerusalem in July. Israel's military has invested tens of millions of dollars to upgrade West Bank crossings and ease entry for Palestinian workers. But critics slam the military's use of facial recognition technology as problematic. A Palestinian man uses a biometric gate as he crosses into Israel at the Qalandia crossing in Jerusalem in July. Israel's military has invested tens of millions of dollars to upgrade West Bank crossings and ease entry for Palestinian workers.

Tel Aviv is the city with the highest number of startups per capita in the world, according to the 2018 Global Startup Ecosystem report -- more than 6,000, of which 18 are unicorns. The city's tech cluster, dubbed Silicon Wadi, is home to more than 100 venture capital funds, plus hundreds of accelerators and co-working places. "Tel Aviv is transitioning from startup nation to scale-up nation," says Eyal Gura, co-founder of Zebra Medical Vision. Amit Gilon, an investor at Kaedan Capital VC fund, agrees – adding that Israel is not just about successful B2B companies anymore, such as Checkpoint, Nice and Amdocs, but also about "big B2C success stories like Playtika, Wix, Fiverr and others". Founded in 2015, Arbe has built a 4D ultra-high-resolution imaging radar for cars.

Facial-recognition software is increasingly being used to track individuals without their permission.Credit: David McNew/AFP/Getty China wants to be the world's leader in artificial intelligence (AI) by 2030. The United States has a strategic plan to retain the top spot, and, by some measures, already leads in influential papers, hardware and AI talent. Other wealthy nations are also jockeying for a place in the world AI league. A kind of AI arms race is under way, and governments and corporations are pouring eye-watering sums into research and development. The prize, and it's a big one, is that AI is forecast to add around US$15 trillion to the world economy by 2030 -- more than four times the 2017 gross domestic product of Germany.