The development of artificial intelligence is hampered by programmers who hide their code

The most basic problem is that AI researchers often don’t share their source code. At the AAAI meeting, Odd Erik Gundersen, a computer scientist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, reported the results of a survey of 400 algorithms presented in papers at two top AI conferences in the past few years. He found that only 6% of the presenters shared the algorithm’s code. Only a third shared the data they tested their algorithms on, and just half shared “pseudocode”—a limited summary of an algorithm. (In many cases, code is also absent from AI papers published in journals, including Science and Nature.)

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Google Makes Its Special AI Chips Available to Others

A few years ago, Google created a new kind of computer chip to help power its giant artificial intelligence systems. These chips were designed to handle the complex processes that some believe will be a key to the future of the computer industry.

On Monday, the internet giant said it would allow other companies to buy access to those chips through its cloud-computing service. Google hopes to build a new business around the chips, called tensor processing units, or T.P.U.s.

“We are trying to reach as many people as we can as quickly as we can,” said Zak Stone, who works alongside the small team of Google engineers that designs these chips.

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