Releases

AWS launched attachable fractional GPU acceleration for EC2 and SageMaker inference workloads.

AWS announced its first custom machine-learning inference chip.

AWS launched a reinforcement-learning education platform built around an autonomous scale race car.

AWS introduced document AI for extracting text, handwriting, forms and tables.

AWS introduced a managed forecasting service based on technology used in Amazon's retail operations.

AWS introduced a managed service for building individualized recommendations using technology derived from Amazon.com.

AWS introduced a managed data-labeling service combining human annotation with active learning.

AWS launched a HIPAA-eligible NLP service for extracting medical entities and relationships from text.

Google open-sources BERT, enabling bidirectional pre-training for language understanding and downstream NLP tasks.

Oracle launched a multi-skill enterprise digital assistant using natural-language understanding and machine learning.

Hugging Face released an open-source PyTorch implementation and pretrained checkpoints for BERT, the project that evolved into the Transformers library.

NVIDIA launched RAPIDS as an open-source GPU-accelerated data science and machine-learning suite.

NVIDIA launched the T4 GPU and TensorRT 5 as a data-center inference platform.

Scale expanded its annotation platform around the image, video, lidar, and sensor-fusion requirements of autonomous-vehicle developers.

Scale raised $18 million in Series B funding led by Index Ventures with participation from Accel, Y Combinator, and other investors.

Baidu announced its first Kunlun AI accelerator for cloud and edge workloads.

Baidu introduced its in-house Kunlun AI computing architecture.

Baidu launched a full-featured machine-learning platform for algorithm developers.

Apollo 3.0 added production support for autonomous minibuses, delivery vehicles and valet parking.

Baidu launched a PaddlePaddle development and education platform for model building.

Baidu Brain 3.0 added multimodal semantic understanding and more than 110 AI capabilities.

OpenAI presented its five-agent Dota 2 system trained through large-scale self-play.

IBM Research demonstrated an AI system that generated evidence-backed arguments and debated a human expert.

OpenAI published the original GPT approach: generative pre-training followed by discriminative fine-tuning.

Databricks introduced MLflow as an open-source platform for managing the machine-learning lifecycle.