This is an updated version. Turing Award Winner and Facebook Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun has announced his exit from popular social networking platform Twitter after getting involved in a long and often acrimonious dispute regarding racial biases in AI. Unlike most other artificial intelligence researchers, LeCun has often aired his political views on social media platforms, and has previously engaged in public feuds with colleagues such as Gary Marcus. This time however LeCun's penchant for debate saw him run afoul of what he termed "the linguistic codes of modern social justice." It all started on June 20 with a tweet regarding the new Duke University PULSE AI photo recreation model that had depixelated a low-resolution input image of Barack Obama into a photo of a white male.

In October, Amazon had to discontinue an artificial intelligence–powered recruiting tool after it discovered the system was biased against female applicants. In 2016, a ProPublica investigation revealed a recidivism assessment tool that used machine learning was biased against black defendants. More recently, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development sued Facebook because its ad-serving algorithms enabled advertisers to discriminate based on characteristics like gender and race. And Google refrained from renewing its AI contract with the Department of Defense after employees raised ethical concerns. Those are just a few of the many ethical controversies surrounding artificial intelligence algorithms in the past few years.

Specialized replicated compute accelerators (RCA) are multiplied up by having multiple copies per ASICs, multiple ASICs per server, multiple servers per rack, and multiple racks per datacenter. Server controller can be an FPGA, microcontroller, or a Xeon processor. Power delivery and cooling system are customized based on ASIC needs. If required, there would be DRAMs on the PCB as well. Each ASIC interconnects its RCAs using a customized on-chip network.

A free facial recognition tool that allows people to find pictures of themselves or others from around the internet has drawn criticism from privacy campaigners. PimEyes describes itself as a privacy tool to help prevent misuse of images. But Big Brother Watch said it could "enable state surveillance, commercial monitoring and even stalking on a scale previously unimaginable". It comes as Amazon decides to pause its use of facial recognition for a year. Polish website PimEyes was set up in 2017 as a hobby project, and commercialised last year.

According to the World Health Organization, more than one billion people worldwide have disabilities. The field of disability studies defines disability through a social lens; people are disabled to the extent that society creates accessibility barriers. AI technologies offer the possibility of removing many accessibility barriers; for example, computer vision might help people who are blind better sense the visual world, speech recognition and translation technologies might offer real-time captioning for people who are hard of hearing, and new robotic systems might augment the capabilities of people with limited mobility. Considering the needs of users with disabilities can help technologists identify high-impact challenges whose solutions can advance the state of AI for all users; however, ethical challenges such as inclusivity, bias, privacy, error, expectation setting, simulated data, and social acceptability must be considered. The inclusivity of AI systems refers to whether they are effective for diverse user populations.

Apple's latest iPhone software update, iOS 13.5, released Wednesday, is there for you. Your eyes, nose and mouth must be visible for Face ID, Apple's facial recognition software, to recognize you. But with the coronavirus, device owners may be wearing masks when out in public. So Apple is making it easier for you to unlock your phone when you have a mask on. Install the update and you will no longer have to wait for Face ID to fail several times before being prompted to enter your passcode.

Engineer and YouTuber Shane Wighton has made a basketball hoop that uses a Microsoft Kinect and facial recognition in order to build a basketball hoop that means the shooter never misses. On the YouTube channel Stuff Made Here, Wighton explains that the backboard is tracking the information in the room, including the ball and its trajectory. With that information, the backboard can calculate where it needs to move in order to ensure the ball gets into the hoop. Since there are only 600 milliseconds (a thousandth of a second) between when the ball is thrown and when it hits the backboard, the calculations need to be made in an incredibly short amount of time. Therefore, Wighton said, when designing the board he had to prioritise fast movement.

Facebook has launched a new chatbot that it claims is able to demonstrate empathy, knowledge and personality. "Blender" was trained using available public domain conversations which included 1.5 billion examples of human exchanges. The social media giant said 49% of people preferred interactions with the chatbot, compared with another human. But experts say training the artificial intelligence (AI) using a platform such as Reddit has its drawbacks. Numerous issues arose during longer conversations.

Almost every industry is seeking top quality Artificial Intelligence (AI) and analytics professionals across the world. Apart from top academic institutions, industry has also been targetting scientific research labs in order to tap those who possess competencies in quantitative techniques proficient in building models and are getting them oriented to design business solutions. The AI as a service market size was valued at $1.13 billion in 2017 and is expected to be $10.88 billion by 2023, thus opening up a huge demand for AI talent pool. The AI-powered services in the form of Application Programming Interface (API) and Software Development Kit (SDK) are primarily driving the demand for AI and analytics professionals. In addition to these, startups working on path breaking ideas are also in need of smart data science professionals.

At the Common Good in the Digital Age tech conference recently held in Vatican City, Pope Francis urged Facebook executives, venture capitalists, and government regulators to be wary of the impact of AI and other technologies. "If mankind's so-called technological progress were to become an enemy of the common good, this would lead to an unfortunate regression to a form of barbarism dictated by the law of the strongest," he said. In a related but contextually different conversation, this summer Joy Buolamwini testified before Congress with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) that multiple audits found facial recognition technology generally works best on white men and worst on women of color. What these two events have in common is their relationship to power dynamics in the AI ethics debate. Arguments about AI ethics can wage without mention of the word "power," but it's often there just under the surface. In fact, it's rarely the direct focus, but it needs to be. Power in AI is like gravity, an invisible force that influences every consideration of ethics in artificial intelligence. Power provides the means to influence which use cases are relevant; which problems are priorities; and who the tools, products, and services are made to serve. It underlies debates about how corporations and countries create policy governing use of the technology.