Google Brain researchers announced a two-billion-parameter deep-learning computer vision (CV) model. The model was trained on three billion pictures and obtained a new state-of-the-art record of 90.45 percent top-1 accuracy on ImageNet. The ViT-G/14 model is based on Google's latest Vision Transformers development (ViT). On numerous benchmarks, including ImageNet, ImageNet-v2, and VTAB-1k, ViT-G/14 beat prior state-of-the-art systems. For example, the accuracy gain on the few-shot picture identification challenge was more than five percentage points.

A new AI system could be used to protect the lives of both humans and elephants. The environmental organization RESOLVE has recently collaborated with the AI developer CVEDIA to engineer an AI that can help prevent encounters between elephants and humans, which sometimes end in the death of one or both parties. For people who live in close proximity to elephants, it isn't uncommon to hear of someone who has died due to an encounter with an elephant or hear of an elephant killed by a human. Although people around the globe are fascinated by elephants, they often raid farm fields and scour small villages for sources of food. This problem has only exacerbated in recent years as traditional elephant food supplies have dwindled and they have been forced to search out alternative food sources.

Sitting in a U.N. committee meeting in Geneva earlier this year in a session on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (aka killer robots), I was shocked to hear the American delegates claim that AI-powered automated warfare could be safe and reliable. Not only are they wrong, but their thinking endangers us all. It's the same logic that led to the Cold War, the nuclear arms race and the Doomsday Clock. I quit my job at a young, promising tech company in January in protest precisely because I was concerned about how the Pentagon might use AI in warfare and how the business I was part of might contribute to it. I have seen close up the perils of this unreliable but powerful technology, and I have since joined the International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC) and the Campaign to Stop Killer Robotsto make sure that AI is used responsibly, even in cases of war.