Facebook has been beset by scandals over the last year and many believe that nothing will change until its founder and CEO is gone. A petition has been launched with one simple objective: to force Mark Zuckerberg to resign as CEO of Facebook. The campaign group behind...

We’ve been wasting our processing power to train neural networks that are ten times too big.Neural networks are the core software of deep learning. Even though they’re so widespread, however, they’re really poorly understood. Researchers have observed their emergent properties without actually understanding why they work the way they do.

Samathur Li Kin-kan, a Hong Kong tycoon, was so impressed with a hedge fund that he decided to invest $2.5 billion in hopes of doubling it over the time. What intrigued him was that the fund is run not by a human, but automatically by an AI-powered robot supercomputer named K1, which is a service offered by Tyndaris Investments, a London-based company.

More than 60 researchers from 30 institutions will get access to Facebook user data to study its impact on elections and democracy, and how it’s used by advertisers and publishers.

Industry has mobilized to shape the science, morality and laws of artificial intelligence. On 10 May, letters of intent are due to the US National Science Foundation (NSF) for a new funding programme for projects on Fairness in Artificial Intelligence, in collaboration with Amazon. In April, after the European Commission released the Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI, an academic member of the expert group that produced them described their creation as industry-dominated “ethics washing”.

Recently, on a dazzling morning in Palm Springs, California, Vivienne Szetook to a small stage to deliver perhaps the most nerve-racking presentation of her career.