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.

Google has developed an AI that can pick out someone's voice in a noisy room. By looking at people's faces when they're speaking, the firm has trained a machine to spot individual people as they talk and isolate their voice against background noise. Technology such as this could easily be used to spy on secret conversations. However, Google claims its applications are likely to be in clearing up speech in video calls and boosting the power of hearing aids. Google has developed an AI that can pick out someone's voice in a noisy room.

Ever wanted to see your holiday snaps in the style of Van Gogh, or have your portrait painted by Picasso? Researchers have revealed an artificial intelligence algorithm that can learn to paint in the style of any artist - and repaint any snap you feed it. Researchers fed their system a series of old masters - and it turned a modern day snap into perfect pictures in the style of some of the world's best known paintings. The team say it can learn the style of any artist simply by analysing a single picture. The original image the team fed the algorithm this image of houses to be'reimagined' in the style of different artists'In fine art, especially painting, humans have mastered the skill to create unique visual experiences through composing a complex interplay between the content and style of an image,' the researchers from the University of Tubingen wrote in the journal Arxiv.

Google has achieved something major in artificial intelligence (AI) research. A computer system it has built to play the ancient Chinese board game Go has managed to win a match against a professional Go player: the European champion Fan Hui. The research is documented in a paper in this week's issue of the journal Nature. The Google system, named AlphaGo, swept France's Hui, who is ranked a 2-dan, in a five-game match at the Google DeepMind office in London in October. AlphaGo played against Hui on a full 19-by-19 Go board and received no handicap.

According to a report in BuzzFeed News, Google is training a new Al to understand human conversation and respond in a suitably human fashion by feeding it a diet of trashy romance. BuzzFeed News quotes Google software engineer Andrew Dai as saying: "In the Google app, the responses are very factual. Hopefully with this work, and future work, it can be more conversational, or can have a more varied tone, or style, or register." Apparently romantic novels are good for this because they're, well, formulaic. Although they employ an adult lexicon, unlike children's books, they follow a simple repetitive structure, making learning easier for the AI.