key-takeaways-ai-conference-san-francisco-2017-day-2.html

We are in a great time with regards to AI and Machine Learning, due to immense interest and the pace of technological advances. Recent papers show that gradient descent will asymptotically avoid saddle points and it can take exponential time to escape saddle points. Jia Li, Head of R&D, Cloud AI and Machine Learning, Google gave an inspirational keynote on "Why democratizing AI matters: Computing, data, algorithms, and talent". Talking about algorithms, she mentioned that her team switched from phrase-based machine translation to Neural Machine Translation (NMT), and this has led to many improvements.