China is funding the future of American biotech | TechCrunch
Silicon Valley is in the midst of a health craze, and it is being driven by “Eastern” medicine. It’s been a record year for US medical investing, but investors in Beijing and Shanghai are now increasingly leading the largest deals for US life science and biotech companies. In fact, Chinese venture firms have invested more this year into life science and biotech in the US than they have back home, providing financing for over 300 US-based companies, per Pitchbook. Chinese capital’s newfound appetite also flows into the mainland. Business is booming for Chinese medical startups, who are also seeing the strongest year of venture investment ever, with over one hundred companies receiving $4 billion in investment.
Relational inductive biases, deep learning, and graph networks | arXiv
Artificial intelligence (AI) has undergone a renaissance recently, making major progress in key domains such as vision, language, control, and decision-making. This has been due, in part, to cheap data and cheap compute resources, which have fit the natural strengths of deep learning. However, many defining characteristics of human intelligence, which developed under much different pressures, remain out of reach for current approaches. In particular, generalizing beyond one’s experiences–a hallmark of human intelligence from infancy–remains a formidable challenge for modern AI. In this paper, the authors argue that combinatorial generalization must be a top priority for AI to achieve human-like abilities, and that structured representations and computations are key to realizing this objective.
How the Blockchain Could Break Big Tech’s Hold on A.I. | The New York Times
The idea of applying the blockchain to artificial intelligence is attracting a growing roster of serious entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, many of them with impressive academic credentials. Some are arguing that the blockchain could be a crucial way to push back against some of the most worrying trends facing the field of artificial intelligence. They believe the blockchain could encourage a broader distribution of the data and algorithms that will determine the future development of artificial intelligence.