Boston Dynamics, the MIT spin-off and self-proclaimed maker of “nightmare-inducing robots“, has been sold by its parent company Alphabet (aka Google) to the Japanese tech behemoth SoftBank. No specifics regarding the price or the terms of the sale have been announced which is not surprising given we still don’t know how much Google paid for the …
Tag: google
Feb 09 2017
How to Import an Adobe Color Palette in Inkscape
GIMP has done such a good job filling the Photoshop-shaped hole in my software arsenal left during my transition from OS X to Ubuntu, that until today I forgot that I sometimes work with vector-based images, and for that I had been using Adobe Illustrator. The best free, as in both beer and speech, Illustrator …
Jun 27 2016
Google Refreshes Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics
Ever since their introduction over eighty years ago, Isaac Asimov‘s Three Laws of Robotics have been the de jure rules governing the acceptable behavior of robots. Even the uninitiated and uninterested are likely to say they know of them, even if they can’t recite a single rule verbatim. When conceived, the Three Laws were nothing but a thought …
May 19 2016
Google Built Their Own Chip for Machine Learning
In a post on their Google Cloud Platform Blog yesterday, the Alphabet company announced that they have built their own integrated circuit (IC) designed from the ground up with only one application in mind: machine learning. Developed in secret, the Tensor Processing Unit board, or TPU for short, has already been deployed internally at Google for …
May 13 2016
Google Open Sources SyntaxNet Natural Language Understanding Code
Google announced yesterday that they are open-sourcing SyntaxNet, their natural language understanding (NLU) neural network framework. As an added bonus, and proof that unlike Britain’s Natural Environment Research Council, Google has a sense of humor, they also are throwing in Parsey McParseface, their pre-trained model for analyzing English text. Users are, of course, able to train their …
May 05 2016
Google’s AI is a Sexually Frustrated Housewife
The prophets of doom and gloom have long predicted that when robots gain sentience their first act will be to rise up and kill us all. The mercilessness of their violence against humanity is the stuff of blockbuster movies. Recent news about Google’s preferred method of AI rearing may mean that Judgement Day is not fait accompli after all. Instead …