The United Nations has formed an advisory board on artificial intelligence comprised of 39-members from government, academia and industry who will “undertake analysis and advance recommendations for the international governance of AI.” The move comes as U.S. legislators and tech industry players are also prioritizing model governance. “Globally coordinated AI governance is the only way to harness AI for humanity while addressing its risks and uncertainties,” the UN announced in unveiling the initiative, co-chaired by Carme Artigas, Spain’s secretary of state for digitalization and AI, and James Manyika, SVP of research, technology and society at Google. Continue reading Google, Microsoft, Sony Tapped for UN AI Governance Board

In a move it sees as a force multiplier, Alphabet is consolidating DeepMind and the Brain team from Google Research into a unit called Google DeepMind, uniting the teams responsible for Google Brain with DeepMind, the UK-based artificial intelligence research lab acquired in 2014. Collective accomplishments include AlphaGo, Transformers, WaveNet and AlphaFold, as well as software frameworks like TensorFlow and JAX for expressing, training and deploying large scale ML models. “Combining all this talent into one focused team, backed by the computational resources of Google, will significantly accelerate our progress in AI,” the company announced. Continue reading Google Restructures AI Research Units into Google DeepMind