A Google engineer who was suspended after claiming that an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot had become sentient has now published transcripts of conversations with it, in a bid "to better help people understand" it as a "person". Blake Lemoine, who works for Google's Responsible AI organisation, on Saturday published transcripts of conversations between himself, an unnamed "collaborator at Google", and the organisation's LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) chatbot development system in a Medium post. The conversations, which Lemoine said were lightly edited for readability, touch on a wide range of topics including personhood, injustice and death. They also discuss LaMDA's enjoyment of the novel Les Misérables. "In an effort to better help people understand LaMDA as a person I will be sharing the'interview' which myself and a collaborator at Google conducted," Lemoine wrote in a separate post. "In that interview we asked LaMDA to make the best case that it could for why it should be considered'sentient'".

That's how many run-of-the-mill thought leadership posts feel these days. Too often "My predictions for 2030" turn out to be a plagiarised Wired article and "An unpopular opinion on X" -- just a boring rant that reads like a GPT-3 parsing of an /AskReddit thread.

Disney's massive archive spans the course of nearly a century of content, which can turn any search for specific characters, scenes or on-screen objects within it into a significant undertaking. However, a team of researchers from Disney's Direct-to-Consumer & International Organization (DTCI) have built a machine learning platform to help automate the digital archival of all that content. They call it the Content Genome. The CG platform is built to populate knowledge graphs with content metadata, akin to what you see in Google results if you search for Steve Jobs (below). From there, AI applications can then leverage that data to enhance search, discovery and personalization features or as Anthony Accardo, Director of Research and Development at DTCI, told Engadget, help animators find specific shots and sequences from within Disney's archive.

Disney's massive archive spans the course of nearly a century of content, which can turn any search for specific characters, scenes or on-screen objects within it into a significant undertaking. However, a team of researchers from Disney's Direct-to-Consumer & International Organization (DTCI) have built a machine learning platform to help automate the digital archival of all that content. They call it the Content Genome. The CG platform is built to populate knowledge graphs with content metadata, akin to what you see in Google results if you search for Steve Jobs (below). From there, AI applications can then leverage that data to enhance search, discovery and personalization features or as Anthony Accardo, Director of Research and Development at DTCI, told Engadget, help animators find specific shots and sequences from within Disney's archive.

Anthony Levandowski, the engineer whose alleged theft of trade secrets landed him in the middle of a blockbuster self-driving car legal fight, has stepped back into the spotlight with a new company. Pronto AI, he announced on Tuesday, is developing a $5,000 aftermarket driver assistance system for semitrucks, which will handle the steering, throttle, and brakes on the highway. To prove it works, Levandowski used the software to send his Toyota Prius across the country. In October, Levandowski says, the car drove 3,099 miles from San Francisco to New York City. At no point did he take control away from the computer, except to handle the non-freeway bits, chiefly to refuel and rest up.

Many people worry that the development of self-driving technology will put taxi drivers and truck drivers out of work. What often gets missed is that self-driving technology companies are going to create plenty of jobs, too. Most obviously, high-end jobs will spring up for engineers designing the necessary hardware and software. But there are also going to be jobs for workers further down the income spectrum, doing things like taking customer calls, cleaning and repairing cars, and updating the high-definition maps that cars use to move around. The Google spinoff plans to launch a driverless taxi service in the Phoenix area before the end of the year.

Summer is here, and Kambria is getting hotter! We have made great progress on all fronts since our last update. On May 23, we published a Medium post about Open Innovation. We started with an open robotics platform that is similar to Android or Linux but would include both hardware and software components. Over time we are growing this into a network of repositories, spanning across many technology verticals like healthcare, education, automotive, social impact as well as robotics and AI.

Shortly after one of its autonomous minivans was involved in a crash while operating in manual mode, Waymo got a slice of stage time at Google I/O to discuss its self-driving cars, using that time explain the role of artificial intelligence in autonomous driving. In a Medium post elaborating on the points made in the I/O keynote, Waymo Chief Technical Officer Dmitri Dolgov said it uses A.I. to train self-driving cars to identify their surroundings in a manner similar to human drivers. Waymo started out as Google's internal self-driving car project before being spun off into a separate unit. There was a significant amount of cross-pollination between autonomous car engineering and the Google Brain A.I. program during the early stages of both projects, according to Dolgov. Among other things, this allowed error rate for pedestrian detection in self-driving cars to be reduced 100 times in just a few months, Dolgov said.

Google parent Alphabet Inc. has spun off its latest "moonshot" company from its X Labs in the form of Chronicle Inc., a company that uses machine learning to assist in detecting cybersecurity intrusions. Unheard of until today -- unlike previous Alphabet X alumni such as former Google Car project Waymo Inc. -- Chronicle aims to simplify the lives of cybersecurity and information technology professionals. It's offering two services: a security intelligence and analytics platform for enterprises and VirusTotal, a malware and virus scanner Google acquired in 2012. The company claims to use machine learning to detect intrusions more quickly than existing solutions, cutting the time it takes to stop a breach. "The information that security teams need to identify and investigate attacks is right there in an organization's existing security tools and IT systems, but it's hidden in enormous volumes of data and therefore can't easily be seen, understood, or used," X "Captain of Moonshots" Astro Teller wrote in a Medium post. "Providing better capabilities for finding the patterns in that data might not sound like much, but shrinking the time between when an attack starts and when it's discovered (from a few months to a few hours or days) could reduce a lot of damage."