Top minds in machine learning predict where AI is going in 2020

AI is no longer poised to change the world someday; it's changing the world now. As we begin a new year and decade, VentureBeat turned to some of the keenest minds in AI to revisit progress made in 2019 and look ahead to how machine learning will mature in 2020. We spoke with PyTorch creator Soumith Chintala, University of California professor Celeste Kidd, Google AI chief Jeff Dean, Nvidia director of machine learning research Anima Anandkumar, and IBM Research director Dario Gil. Everyone always has predictions for the coming year, but these are people shaping the future today -- individuals with authority in the AI community who treasure scientific pursuit and whose records have earned them credibility. While some predict advances in subfields like semi-supervised learning and the neural symbolic approach, virtually all the ML luminaries VentureBeat spoke with agree that great strides were made in Transformer-based natural language models in 2019 and expect continued controversy over tech like facial recognition. They also want to see the AI field grow to value more than accuracy.