An eight-year-old boy who became the world's youngest coder has set his sights on building a robot doctor. Kautilya Katariya, who set a world record for being the youngest qualified computer programmer two years ago, recently achieved grade nine in GCSE maths, the highest possible mark. Katariya, from Northampton, has already developed AI software and one day hopes to set up his own company. The Year 3 pupil taught himself coding during the Covid-19 lockdowns and prepared for his GCSE exams alongside students in Year 10 and 11. Rather than playing computer games, he has more fun building them using programming languages such as Python.

It's hard to find a tech company that isn't attempting some sort of AI-related product, service, or initiative these days, but eBay went all-in by building its own AI platform, called Krylov. Sanjeev Katariya, eBay's VP and chief architect of AI and platforms, described Krylov in an interview with VentureBeat: "At the very highest level, Krylov is a machine learning platform that enables data scientists and machine learning engineers to ship all different kinds of models for all kinds of data quickly into production, which gets integrated into user experiences that eBay ships globally." It's a multi-tenant, cloud-based platform that involves technologies like computer vision and natural language processing (NLP), techniques including distributed training and hyper-parameter tuning, and tools germane to eBay's services, like merchandising recommendations, buyer personalization, seller price guidance, and shipping estimates. Even if they did, the hard costs -- however significant they may or may not be -- wouldn't fully capture what eBay has invested to build the platform over years of internal organizational efforts around the globe. And after all that, eBay is now open-sourcing Krylov.

Climate change is the most existential threat humanity faces today, and AI can solve problems in unprecedented ways. It only makes sense that we use the latter to work on the former. That was a significant sub-theme of NeurIPS 2019, highlighted in particular by the Tackling Climate Change workshop, and talk from some prominent leaders in machine learning suggests that the ML field can and should focus on it. There are two thrusts: One is about urging machine learning practitioners to use their research to work on solving climate change problems. The other is about ensuring that performing the research itself doesn't ironically contribute to climate change.

Many of the biggest tech companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon have realized the value of creating their own AI platforms for both internal and customer-facing services. Facebook's FBLearner Flow helps the social media site filter out offensive posts, while Uber's Michelangelo gives users time predictions for food deliveries. To keep up with the competition, eBay has unveiled its AI platform, Krylov, which has given the company a wide range of new capabilities from improved language translation services to searching with images. In a blog post, eBay's Sanjeev Katariya, vice president and chief architect of the eBay AI and platforms, and Ashok Ramani, director of product management, computer vision, natural and language processing, discussed the creation of Krylov and how it has changed things both inside eBay and for users of the site. "With computer vision powered by eBay's modern AI platform, the technology helps you find items based on the click of your camera or an image. Users can go onto the eBay app and take a photo of what they are looking for and within milliseconds, the platform surfaces items that match the image," Katariya and Ramani wrote in December.

In a post this week, its Chief Architect and Vice President of eBay AI and Platforms Sanjeev Katariya said AI is woven into all aspects of its platform and touches every experience within eBay. "We have over two decades of data and customer insights that we use to train our algorithms and make our AI smarter," Katariya said. "Every time a user interacts with the marketplace, the AI learns and provides feedback so we can create a better experience.The advances have been accelerated by developments in deep learning that allows us -- and others -- to make longer strides in how we process data." Of particular interest to sellers: eBay is using artificial intelligence in search, personalization, recommendation systems, and insights and discovery – as well as computer vision, machine translation, and natural language processing. "AI has become the key to understanding buyer behavior and removing friction to ensure we're serving up the best experiences," Katariya said.

The idea that the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence in business applications could benefit from standards and best practices motivated several of the largest tech companies in the world to found the Partnership on AI. The Partnership focuses on areas of AI use, like privacy, fairness, equitable distribution of jobs and making sure AI is applied to social problems in a positive way. Now, the Partnership is expanding its ranks beyond the original founding members of Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and IBM. EBay Inc., which announced this month it will participate, is the latest to join the exclusive group. In an interview, Sanjeev Katariya, eBay's chief architect, said the company's decision to take part is all about ensuring that, as AI in business becomes more common, it lives up to a high standard for both ethics and efficacy. What does eBay hope to get out of participating in the Partnership?