According to the report, a new algorithm called BigGAN can create detailed and quite realistic photos from scratch. "BigGAN, the last three letters of which stand for generative adversarial network. This kind of neural net is composed of two models: one that conjures random images out of random numbers, and one that compares these generated images to real images and tells the generator just how far off it is. GANs are common in machine learning research, and BigGAN isn't that different from other algorithms out there. But there is one big difference: BigGAN throws a ton of computational power, courtesy of Google, at the problem."

Over the weekend, a Google intern and two researchers from Google's DeepMind division released a paper, currently under review for a 2019 conference, featuring AI-generated images that blow everything else out of the water. Based on the small thumbnails, it's almost impossible to tell that they're not real images: There's a chestnut-colored dog with his tongue hanging out, a beautiful ocean vista, a monarch butterfly, and a juicy hamburger complete with melted cheese and a bun that looks like it was brushed with butter. The textures of the images, from the dog's fur to the hamburger's juices, are incredibly realistic, with careful study revealing only tiniest of tells that the image isn't a real one. The research is making waves in the research community, where some expressed shock at the image quality. Oriol Vinyals, a research scientist at DeepMind, wondered if the images were the "best GAN samples ever." "I want to live in a #BIGGAN generated world!" wrote Meltem Atay, a neurotechnology PhD student who focuses on machine learning.

Geoffrey Hinton is one the most famous researchers in the field of artificial intelligence. His work helped kick off the world of deep learning we see today. He earned his PhD in artificial intelligence back in 1977 and, in the 40 years since, he's played a key role in the development of back-propagation and Boltzmann Machines. So it was a bit hilarious to learn in a Reddit AMA hosted by the Google Brain Team that Hinton was briefly a Google intern in 2012. Prompted by a question about age cut-offs for interns on Brain Team, Jeff Dean, a Google Senior Fellow and leader of the research group, explained that his team has no arbitrary rules limiting the age of interns.