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Millions of books and scientific papers are captured in the collection’s current iteration.Editor’s note: This search tool is part of The Atlantic’s investigation into the Library Genesis data set. You can read an analysis about LibGen and its contents here. Find The Atlantic’s search tool for movie and television writing used to train AI here. Disclaimer: LibGen contains errors. You may, for example, find books that list incorrect authors. This search tool is meant to reflect material that could be used to train AI programs, and that includes material containing mistakes and inaccuracies.

“We’ve now exhausted basically the cumulative sum of human knowledge …. in AI training,” Musk said during a livestreamed conversation with Stagwell chairman Mark Penn streamed on X late Wednesday. “That happened basically last year.” Musk, who owns AI company xAI, echoed themes former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever touched on at NeurIPS, the machine learning conference, during an address in December. Sutskever, who said the AI industry had reached what he called “peak data,” predicted a lack of training data will force a shift away from the way models are developed today. Indeed, Musk suggested that synthetic data —...

The civilization of Indus River Valley is considered one of the three earliest civilizations in world history, along with Mesopotamia and Egypt. Bigger geographically than those two as it unfolded starting in 3300 BCE across what is now Pakistan and India, the Indus civilization boasted uniform weights and measures, skilled artisans, a multifaceted system of trade and commerce, and upwards of 500 symbols and signs for communicating.But one question has vexed scholars for decades and hindered attempts to learn more about this civilization: Were those characters a language or more akin to pictograms? Even as some experts begin to translate...

Computer-science departments across US universities do not have enough lecturers to teach increasing numbers of students interested in AI, a report from the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) this month suggested. Interest in machine learning and artificial intelligence has risen and fallen since the field was formally founded in the 1950s. Neural networks have made a comeback in recent years, exploding in popularity with deep learning. Demand for machine-learning courses at universities has skyrocketed, we're told, and there aren't enough lecturers to support students' interest. Data compiled by the Taulbee survey, and quoted in the report, showed that...

KAUST researchers have found a way to significantly increase the speed of training. Large machine learning models can be trained significantly faster by observing how frequently zero results are produced in distributed machine learning that use large training datasets.AI models develop their “intelligence” by being trained on datasets that have been labelled to tell the model how to differentiate between different inputs and then respond accordingly. The more labelled data that goes in, the better the model becomes at performing whatever task it has been assigned to do. For complex deep learning applications, such as self-driving vehicles, this requires enormous...

A smart thermostat quickly learns to optimize building microclimates for both energy consumption and user preference. Buildings account for about 40 percent of U.S. energy consumption, and are responsible for one-third of global carbon dioxide emissions. Making buildings more energy-efficient is not only a cost-saving measure, but a crucial climate change mitigation strategy. Hence the rise of “smart” buildings, which are increasingly becoming the norm around the world. Smart buildings automate systems like heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC); lighting; electricity; and security. Automation requires sensory data, such as indoor and outdoor temperature and humidity, carbon dioxide concentration, and occupancy...

Spotify made waves after it introduced its music service to the masses in 2008, allowing users to stream music as opposed to buying a record or purchasing a song on iTunes. Hailing nearly twice as many subscribers as competitor Apple music. Spotify continues to be a primary source for those who want to listen to music without having to buy every song or album desired.One of the cool aspects about the former startup is that much of their music information (artists, albums, tracks, etc) is exposed via a web API. This includes attributes for each song such as its tempo,...

New free AWS machine-learning training offers everyone the same curriculum that its employees use. Amazon has announced new, free courses in machine learning, offering all developers the same curriculum that it uses to train its own software engineers and data scientists. The company has over 30 online machine-learning courses, including video, labs, and documentation that have been used within Amazon for the past 20 years. The courses are split into four main tracks, catering to developers, data scientists, data platform engineers, and business types. Developers, for example, are offered courses that teach machine-learning building blocks, how to build machine-learning applications,...

As artificial intelligence is rapidly gaining ground, MIT researchers have created what they call "the world's first psychopath AI," giving it darker views on things by feeding it gruesome content from Reddit. Aptly named "Norman," like the character from Alfred Hitchcock's famous Psycho, the psychopath AI went on a diet of gruesome and violent content from a Reddit page known for its dark posts. As a result, Norman got a whole different view of everything compared to a regular AI that learned from other sources. The researchers note that Norman is a case study aiming to see how AI could...

A blind man in a dark room is looking for his black cat, and he can't find it. He calls in a sighted person for help. He can't find the cat either but is more confounded than the owner. Because the room is dark and the cat is black, the sighted person can't presume the cat isn't in the room. Anthony Scriffignano and his data science team at Dun & Bradstreet Inc. work on problems like this all the time: They search for data that is elusive -- maybe hiding in plain sight or not there at all. Scriffignano, SR...

Help teach Cortana to say 'Sorry, Dave' Microsoft's decided that it, too, wants to open source some of its machine learning space, publishing its Distributed Machine Learning Toolkit (DMTK) on Github. Google released some of its code last week. Redmond's (co-incidental?) response is pretty basic: there's a framework, and two algorithms, but Microsoft Research promises it will get extended in the future. The DMTK Framework is front-and-centre, since that's where both extensions will happen. It's a two-piece critter, consisting of a parameter server and a client SDK. The parameter server has "separate data structures for high- and low-frequency parameters", Microsoft...

In 2010, the best systems got around 25% WER for recorded phone conversations, meaning that a quarter of the words were misrecognized. This is actually pretty good, since people often speak very quickly with lots of background noise and add lots of disfluencies (e.g., “like…uh…yeah…so I…I…ok…right”). By comparison, the WER for Google Voice data, which includes search queries and dictated messages, was 16%. Compared to other areas of artificial intelligence, speech is a mature field, especially since it was commercialized so early by IBM and Dragon Systems. Because of this, by the time 2010 rolled around, even incremental progress had...

Being a math geek has never been cooler, at least in Silicon Valley. As Bay Area technology companies ramp up hiring out of the recession, they are in hot pursuit of a particular kind of employee: those with experience in statistics and other data-manipulation techniques. Rather than looking for just plain-vanilla computer scientists, who typically don't have as deep a study of math and statistics, companies from Facebook Inc. to online advertising company AdMob Inc. say they need more workers with stronger backgrounds in statistics and a related field called machine learning, which involves writing algorithms that get smarter over...