When Silicon Valley came back this season, viewers may not have known what to expect, but they certainly knew what not to expect. T.J. Miller's much-ballyhooed exit meant that the show would be without its most dependable (if incompetent) trickster. Since the HBO show's inception, Erlich Bachman had been the perfect agent of chaos: shortsighted, greedy, and insecure enough to constantly undercut the Pied Piper gang without being an actual antagonist. Couple his departure that with the show's increasingly how are they gonna get out of this--oh, they just did narrative curlicues, and even fans would have been forgiven for assuming the worst for Season 5. Is that how the newest batch turned out? The season, which wrapped up last night, felt as ripped-from-the-headlines as other years--this time cryptocurrency flameouts, Tesla, and Sophia the robot got the parody treatment--but it also added some new variables to the mix.

Already stars like Gal Gadot and Cara Delevingne are victims of nonconsensual face swapping. The Screen Actors Guild‐American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) recently made a bold statement against deepfakes, a technique that uses artificial intelligence to digitally impose an actors' likenesses into a film without permission. As reported by Deadline Hollywood, the president of SAG-AFTRA, Gabrielle Carteris, wrote in the union's monthly magazine that it has "undertaken an exhaustive review of our collective bargaining options and legislative options to combat any and all uses of digital re-creations, not limited to deepfakes, that defame our members and inhibit their ability to protect their images, voices and performances from misappropriation." Carteris is specific about these unauthorized uses, using examples of "in advertisements, products, merchandise, company branding, fake news, movies, video games, or pornography." The use of deepfake technology to create non consensual erotic content is considered particularly shameful.

Like it or not, artificial intelligence already plays a considerable role in your life. Maybe Facebook's algorithm pointed you toward this article. Maybe you just switched off a Netflix movie that magically popped up in your recommendations. Maybe you're hiding under your bed hoping that hyper-intelligent machines won't find you. OK, that last one is an exaggeration, but maybe not by as much as you'd think.

Does anyone know any paper that contains practical recommendations for the process of manual hyper parameter optimization? Such as which parameters to optimize first and which ones should be optimized in groups, etc. Thank you

Milo Medin, a Google vice president, turned the conversation to using artificial intelligence in war games.

I never should have started watching Westworld. Not because I didn't think it'd be good. An HBO show based on a Michael Crichton idea starring Evan Rachel Wood with all kinds of artificial intelligence? The problem wasn't that Westworld wouldn't be enjoyable, it was that it's the kind of show that invites obsession. The kind that presents Big Questions--that never get answered.

I wanted to get the community's take on the best frameworks and libraries out there that let you take a model from offline training to serving in production. What has everyone liked using and had success with?

If you thought watching Westworld was like flipping through a blood-soaked college philosophy textbook, you weren't wrong. Its meditations on the nature of the mind are growing increasingly knotty, putting flesh and bones to the meandering thought experiments that keep undergrads up at night. Episode 4 of Season 2 opens in a sleek apartment. Jim Delos (Peter Mullan) is going through his morning routine: riding his exercise bike, sitting down to a cup of coffee, and with a trembling hand spilling the cream. The apartment's walls are one-way mirrors, and on the other side, technicians monitor the conversation.

This week at Google's big conference, Google I/O, the tech giant unveiled a demonstration of the Google Assistant booking a haircut over the phone. To much of the audience's surprise, the bot sounded a lot like a real person--with human-like pauses and ticks. This feature, called Duplex, can only be used in exchanges that are functional and in "closed domains". This means Duplex could work perfectly with something like making reservations. The Network writer Jason Deign saw this robot-calling phenomenon coming last year in his piece "Could a robot fool you on the phone?"

When it comes to dreaming about the future, there are several key technological categories that manage to be both highly practical yet futuristic enough for us to consider. But just like with everything new, it has to replace the old, upending our world. The chief among those is artificial intelligence (AI). We do not have to wait at all to see AI's influence in our society and various sectors either. It has already made numerous tasks in a variety of sectors different with machine learning.