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Weekly#223

  • Box is releasing a tool to make it easier for large companies to shift workloads to the cloud
  • The New York Times is expanding comments with the help of Google’s AI
    Until now, comments have been enabled on only 10 percent of articles. By the end of the year, the Times plans to get that up to 80 percent
  • Snapchat quietly revealed how it can put AI on your phone
    With these tweaks, Snap claims to fit its algorithm into just 5.2 MB—about the size of a standard song in MP3—with accuracy that just edges out Google’s latest research attempt to scale down its mobile AI. With both networks taking that same 5.2 MB space, Snap scored 65.8% accuracy while Google scored 64.7% on a standard image recognition task, according to the paper.
  • Forget Police Sketches: Researchers Perfectly Reconstruct Faces by Reading Brainwaves
    The values of each dial were so predictable that scientists were able to recreate a face the monkey saw simply by recording the electrical activity of roughly 200 brain cells
  • New ‘Industroyer’ Virus Is Designed to Take Down Power Grids
  • Chatbots are dumb, but wait until they learn how to negotiate for you
    “…According to a new study from TiVo out this morning, 77.3 percent now want “a la carte” TV service – meaning, they want to only pay for the channels they actually watch...”
  • Google will  buy 300 apartment units from Factory OS, a modular-home startup, in a building likely to serve as short-term housing for Google employees, according to executives from both companies.
  • Spending on paid enhancements most often encountered in free mobile games hit $71 billion in 2016
  • How do you draw a circle? Analyzing 100,000 drawings to show how culture shapes our instincts
  • More people now subscribe to Netflix than cable TV in the US (50,8 milion vs 48.61 million)
  • Amazon Prime members can upload their outfits and get a fashion expert’s opinion — here’s what it’s like to use in person
  • SpaceX is also ramping up hiring. It had 473 open positions in March and 487 as of this posting, and many are dedicated to the company’s Mars-exploration efforts.
  • New Energy Outlook 2017
  • Amazon might buy Silicon Valley darling Slack for $9 billion
  • An Artificial Intelligence Developed Its Own Non-Human Language.
    When Facebook designed chatbots to negotiate with one another, the bots made up their own way of communicating.
  • U.S. Invests $258 Million in Supercomputing Race With China
  • “…Chinese scientists have succeeded in sending specially linked pairs of light particles from space to Earth, an achievement experts in the field say gives China a leg up in using quantum technology to build an “unhackable” global communications network
  • Quantum Computing Technologies markets will reach $10.7 billion by 2024
  • Spotify has guaranteed to pay big music labels billions over the next two years.
    The streaming service posted revenue of $3.3 billion last year.
  • Lyft sets goal of 1 billion autonomous electric rides per year by 2025