DeepMind Tackles Fusion Energy as AI Research Evolves
March 2022 brings major AI updates, including DeepMind's breakthrough in controlling fusion plasma and new tools like PyTorch's TorchRec for recommender systems.
March 2022 brings exciting developments in the artificial intelligence landscape as major conferences like WSDM and AAAI wrap up their latest sessions. DeepMind leads the headlines by successfully applying deep learning to control plasma in fusion science, a major step toward realizing the long-held dream of clean and cheap energy production. This breakthrough gives scientists a powerful new tool to understand and manage plasma behavior inside experimental fusion reactors.
The academic research experience sees a notable upgrade as arXiv officially supports viewing papers as responsive web pages through a collaboration with the KWARC research group. Users easily access this feature by swapping "arxiv" with "ar5iv" in any paper URL, providing a welcome alternative to the traditional PDF format. Meanwhile, PyTorch releases TorchRec, a specialized domain library designed to deliver the sparsity and parallelism primitives required for large-scale recommender systems.
Beyond these major headlines, the AI community explores a variety of innovative applications and research directions. Uber now leverages deep learning to improve its estimated time of arrivals, while MuZero finds an unexpected use case in video compression. Research trends highlighted by Zeta Alpha showcase key advancements in information retrieval, neural rendering, vision-language multimodality, and even alternatives to traditional backpropagation.