Global Big Data Conference

Earlier this month, researchers at the Allen Institute for AI -- a nonprofit founded by late Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen -- released an interactive demo of a system they describe as part of a "new generation" of AI applications that can analyze, search across, and respond to questions about videos "at scale." Called Merlot Reserve, the researchers had the system "watch" 20 million YouTube videos to learn the relationships between images, sounds, and subtitles, allowing it to, for example, answer questions such as "What meal does the person in the video want to eat?" or "Has the boy in this video swam in the ocean before?" Systems that can process and relate information from audio, visuals and text have been around for years. These technologies continue to improve in their ability to understand the world more like humans. San Francisco research lab OpenAI's DALL-E, which was released in 2021, can generate images of objects -- real or imagined -- from simple text descriptions like "an armchair in the shape of an avocado."