Mini Episode: Startup News, NeurIPS Changes, and US-China Tensions
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Hello and welcome, this is Daniel Bashir here with Skynet today's Week in AI. This week we'll look at more startup news, updates from the world's largest AI conference, and how US-China tensions are affecting their AI alliance. First, it turns out that I, or the article I was reporting on, was actually wrong last week about Boston Dynamics' dog Spot.

If you've been setting aside some money for a luxury car, you can use it to buy your very own quadrupedal robotic dog instead for just $74,500. But it still won't be your run-of-the-mill pet. According to the IEEE Spectrum, Boston Dynamics has been careful to specify that Spot is intended for commercial use and that they don't want people using it at home for fun.

While Boston Dynamics is building hardware you can now bring home, another startup is trying to help you free yourself from it. According to the MIT Technology Review, MIT professor near Shabit startup Neuromagic wants to allow any company to deploy a deep learning model without the need for expensive GPUs and massive amounts of compute.

By fiddling with the software to make deep learning algorithms run more efficiently on a CPU, their product is able to achieve the same performance as a GPU despite not being able to use parallelization. Chauvet believes this may be the future of deep learning, but others are not so sure. Despite the desire for accessibility, the field will need to move forward and therefore require even more advanced and specialized hardware.

The need for hardware may make AI less inclusive, but AI's most prominent conference is trying to move in the other direction. NeurIPS, which has received press in the past few years for first changing its acronym in response to problematic behavior and second requiring a societal impact statement, is changing even more this year.

OneZero reports that the 2020 conference, which will be entirely virtual, has lifted its attendance cap and substantially reduced the ticket price. NeurIPS used to be a microcosm of a field that is largely white and male, with its high costs of attendance preserving the homogeneity. But organizers and attendees hope the changes will continue the push for inclusivity.

Finally, Chinese search giant Baidu has left the partnership on AI, a US-led effort to promote collaboration on ethical issues related to AI. Wired reports that Baidu cited financial pressures and the cost of membership for its leaving. But the departure comes amid strained times for US-China relations.

Wired reports that the US and China seem to be locked in a technological cold war. The US has launched fierce criticism of Chinese AI companies recently, particularly for their role in supporting nationwide surveillance and the repression of Muslims in Xinjiang province.

A separation between the US and China will be difficult due to the countries' already established interdependence. Furthermore, engagement with Chinese companies could offer visibility on China's AI development and help the US regulate against authoritarian uses of AI.

That's all for this week. Thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed the podcast, be sure to rate and share. If you'd like to hear more news like this, please check out skynetoday.com, where you can find our weekly news digests with similar articles.