Zillow’s AI-powered home flipping business lost $881 million in 2021
The now defunct business inside of Zillow faltered as home prices surged
Happy Sunday everyone!
I hope you’re loving Machine Learnings! If so, I’d like to invite you to another newsletter that I am writing called Top of the Stack.
Every Sunday evening I’ll send you 5 great indie newsletters that I have discovered recently. My goal is twofold:
1. make it easy to discover awesome newsletters.
2. help authors grow their audiences.
Check it out and let me know what you think 👇
Awesome, not awesome.
#Awesome
“While Matthew Stafford and Joe Burrow battle in this year's Super Bowl, artificial intelligence will be operating behind the scenes to measure just how well they really played.
The NFL is unveiling a new measure of quarterbacks' performances within a given game. Called the Passing Score, the metric uses Amazon Web Services' A.I. to assess a quarterback's execution on each play. At the end of the game, the player is graded on a scale of 50 to 99. Priya Ponnapalli, senior manager and principal scientist at the Amazon Machine Learning Solutions Lab, says the tool can have implications beyond the sports world.
"These learnings and advances will ultimately extend beyond the football field to general wellness, among many potential applications," she says. "It could expand to workplace health and safety, and better design of stadiums and work environments, like in manufacturing."” - Kevin J. Ryan, Staff Writer Learn More from Inc >
#Not Awesome
“OpenAI’s top researcher has made a startling claim this week: that artificial intelligence may already be gaining consciousness.
Ilya Sutskever, chief scientist of the OpenAI research group, tweeted today that “it may be that today’s large neural networks are slightly conscious.”
Needless to say, that’s an unusual point of view. The widely accepted idea among AI researchers is that the tech has made great strides over the past decade, but still falls far short of human intelligence, nevermind being anywhere close to experiencing the world consciously.
It’s possible that Sutskever was speaking facetiously, but it’s also conceivable that as the top researcher at one of the foremost AI groups in the world, he’s already looking downrange.” - Noor Al-Sibai, Staff Writer Learn More from Futurism >
What we're reading.
1/ The IRS has officially cut ties with facial recognition company ID.me following growing backlash. They had originally planned to lean on the company and technology as a requirement for filing taxes online. Learn More from Protocol >
2/ Machine learning and AI salaries dropped in 2021 while tech salaries overall rose. Learn More from IEEE Spectrum >
3/ Zillow’s AI-powered home flipping business lost $881 million in 2021. Learn More from The Wall Street Journal >
4/ Congress has introduced a new bill, The Social Media NUDGE Act, that “instructs researchers to identify a number of ways to slow down the spread of harmful content and misinformation”. Learn More from The Verge >
5/ Meta is introducing a tool that will allow users in its metaverse to set up personal space boundaries as virtual harassment increases. Learn More from Reuters >
6/ Sony AI researchers have created an AI program that can outperform the best human players at video game Gran Turismo. The researchers used a method called deep reinforcement learning that rewards the AI for certain behaviors as it performs. Learn more from Scientific American >
7/ [Acquisition] Apple buys AI music startup “AI Music” that uses AI to create original music based on user interaction. Learn More from Bloomberg >
Newsletters and products from our friends.
White Noise is a free, weekly newsletter dedicated to tackling the big questions: What makes life worth living? What's it all for? Why am I doing what I am doing? In it, writer and investor Tom White covers books and bromides, psychology and philosophy, behavior and the brain. If you're interested in delving deeply into the why behind our panoply of whats while attempting to eke out a big helping of capital-T truth in the process, you would do well to subscribe! Check out White Noise >
Since the end of the Cold War, foreign news coverage has dropped from 40 percent of the news hour to less than 4 percent—and declined by 80 percent in print news.The Cosmopolitan Globalist aims to fill that void. We’re a collection of journalists, academics, politicians, and analysts around the globe, shepherded into a single platform by Claire Berlinski in Paris and Vivek Kelkar in Mumbai, all dedicated to asking the question: Why is autocracy rising across the globe and why is liberal democracy on the decline? Check out the Cosmopolitan Globalist >
Want to discover awesome indie newsletters before your friends? Top of the Stack 🥞 introduces you to 5 indie newsletters and the talented writers behind them every Sunday morning. Check out Top of the Stack 🥞 >
Hey everyone!
If you're curious in trying out a machine learning enabled product, I'd love to hear your feedback on, Heyday, a new app that I've been working on. Heyday is a browser extension that uses machine learning to boost your memory when you're browsing the web and doing research.
Here’s a piece that Fast Company wrote about Heyday this week.
-Sam