Google will not renew a contract to do artificial intelligence work for the US Pentagon, company sources say. The decision follows strong opposition in the technology giant's workforce. A number of Google employees resigned and thousands of others signed a protest petition against taking part in the Pentagon project, known as Maven. They feared it was the first step towards using artificial intelligence for lethal purposes. There has been no official statement from Google.

God be with the days when AI meant a fella coming to get the cows pregnant. It can make a medical diagnosis or compose music or play chess. If artificial intelligence was a TV character it would be a mix of Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory and a handsome doctor from Grey's Anatomy. New York City Council is currently going through a process to establish exactly how many algorithms are involved in the governance of the city: because they don't know how many there are. They do know that it's involved in the allocation of police officers, food stamps and public housing.

I recently read the "Learning to generate reviews and discovering sentiment" paper by OPENAI and found it to be super cool. But I could not understand how they are using the language model as feature extractor. Suppose we have 150 characters in a review, how do we extract features from these 150 characters when our input is 64 characters at a time.

Im finding it hard to find the information on this, but im sure its fine. The gtx 1050 ti is listed as having a compute capability of 6.1. Or if someone can point me to a list of supported GPUs for matconvnet that would be stellar!

The world of wine is vast, and it seems like there are more wineries out there than grapes in a vineyard. As such, finding that perfect bottle of vino can feel like a nightmare. And, while asking your friends for recommendations can help refine the process, you can't always rely on their tastes to match your own. So, why not let data do the matching for you? Services like Spotify and Netflix already use artificial intelligence to match their users with music and TV - content that can be just as nuanced as a bottle of Merlot - and they do so with great effect.

Shawn Moynihan is Editor-in-Chief of National Underwriter Property & Casualty. A St. John's University alum, Moynihan has earned 11 Jesse H. Neal Awards, the Pulitzers of the business press; seven Azbee Awards, from the American Society of Business Press Editors; two Folio Awards; and a SABEW award, from the Society of American Business Editors & Writers. Prior to joining ALM, he served as Managing Editor/Online Editor of journalism institution Editor & Publisher, the trade bible of the newspaper industry. Moynihan also has held editorial positions with AOL, Metro New York, and Newhouse Newspapers. He can be reached at smoynihan@alm.com.

In 2009, Fox released James Cameron's Avatar, an absurdly expensive, but also absurdly profitable, science fiction adventure featuring cutting-edge special effects. Its success provided further confirmation to what had already become entrenched conventional wisdom in Hollywood: Movies should be big because big makes money. That same year, Paramount distributed Paranormal Activity, a horror movie shepherded by the then–little-known Blumhouse Productions. Directed by the unknown Oren Peli, it originally cost $15,000, was shot on consumer-grade video cameras, and had already been kicking around festivals for a couple of years. It went on to gross nearly $200 million, confirming that conventional wisdom didn't always apply.

With WWDC a couple days out, we're coming up on one year since Apple first showed off its glitzy answer to the Amazon Echo and Google Home smart speakers. It took over 8 months from then for the HomePod to finally hit shelves and it took up until a couple of days ago for all the promised functionality to arrive. Four months since launch, it's clear Apple delivered some awesome hardware, but there are plenty of features I want to see the HomePod pick up when Apple comes to the stage at its annual developer conference to talk iOS 12. For all the criticisms levied against the device, the most weighty has been the fact that there isn't even a vague reason to consider buying the speaker unless you are an Apple Music subscriber. For Apple Watch LTE users who want to listen to non-Apple Music tunes the same is true to a lesser degree.

Last year, China said it plans to be a world leader in AI by 2030. Now its capital is building a massive campus to house the AI firms that will power that rise, according to local media outlet Beijing News (link in Chinese). Authorities in Beijing's Mentougou district will build the tech campus along with Zhongguancun Development Group, a company that has built several similar technology parks in China. They plan to invest 13.8 billion yuan (about $2.1 billion) in the 548,700 square-meter park, and hope to to attract over 400 enterprises. Construction will be completed within three to five years. The park, which will count on 5G telecom and have a supercomputer, will focus on developing areas such as high-speed big data, cloud computing, biometric identification, deep learning, state-run news agency Xinhua added.

Analysts believe Apple will try to inject more artificial intelligence and other new powers into Siri to make it more competitive with Google's digital assistant and Amazon's Alexa. Apple just gave its HomePod smart speaker new features, including calendar reminders -- something Google and Amazon devices have long offered. Apple has been emphasizing the HomePod's high-fidelity acoustics, including the ability to pair two devices in stereo mode, in an effort to distinguish its product from Google's and Amazon's speakers, which primarily serve as hubs for those companies' voice-activated assistants. Monday's preview could include more on that front.