This Week's Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through November 5)

Having AIs Train Robot Dogs to Balance Makes Them a Lot Cheaper Jeremy Tsu New Scientist "An AI has been used to train a small robot dog to perform cleaning tasks. The hardware cost a total of $6300, which is less than a tenth of the price tag of the well-known robot dogs built by US tech firm Boston Dynamics. This type of self-taught robotic body coordination relies on an AI training regimen that could pave the way for affordable robot dogs and possibly even humanoid robots that could be used as helpers in homes and workplaces." Google Plans Giant AI Language Model Supporting World's 1,000 Most Spoken Languages James Vincent The Verge "i'The way we get to 1,000 languages is not by building 1,000 different models. Languages are like organisms, they've evolved from one another and they have certain similarities. And we can find some pretty spectacular advances in what we call zero-shot learning when we incorporate data from a new language into our 1,000 language model and get the ability to translate [what it's learned] from a high-resource language to a low-resource language,' says [Zoubin Ghahramani, vice president of research at Google AI]. Genetically Modified Mosquitoes Cut the Insect's Number by 96 Percent Miriam Fauzia New Scientist "Although not a permanent fix, periodically releasing such mosquitoes could reduce the burden of infections including dengue, malaria, and Zika.