Microsoft is laying off at least 50 contract journalists and replacing them with AI technology. The workers, who include 27 writers with the U.K.'s PA Media Group, are employed at the Microsoft News and MSN organizations, including many in the SANE (search, ads, News, Edge) division. Former Microsoft employees told the Seattle Times that automated algorithms would perform their duties, including curating news and other content, when their contracts expire after June 30.

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• The layoffs affect workers in the U.S. and U.K.
• A Microsoft spokesperson said the layoffs are not a result of the pandemic.
• One of the terminated workers told the Seattle Times that their duties have been "semi-automated for a few months, but now it's full speed ahead."
• PA Media and other news organizations have furloughed staff and cut pay as ad revenues have fallen in recent years, which has been exacerbated during the pandemic.

OpenAI has debuted its newest language model, GPT-3, with 175 billion parameters. More than 30 OpenAI researchers released a paper about the model, which can achieve state-of-the-art results on a set of benchmark and natural language processing tasks, such as generating news articles and translating languages.

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• The 72-page paper, Language Models are Few-Shot Learners, was posted on the arXiv pre-print server last week.
• GPT-3, trained on the Common Crawl dataset, can process two orders of magnitude more text than GPT-2, its predecessor released in full late last year.
• GPT-3's 175 billion parameters - a neural network calculation - surpasses the largest version of GPT-2's 1.5 billion parameters and Microsoft Turing-NLG's 17 billion parameters.
• GPT-3 achieved almost state-of-the-art results in the COPA and ReCoRD reading comprehension data sets but fell short in school exam questions for word-in-context analysis (WiC) and RACE.
• OpenAI had declined to comment on when a full version of GPT-3 could be released.

More workers are concerned about losing their jobs to AI as their skills become more outdated, according to a new survey.

A 5G-powered autonomous robot in South Korea can check people's temperatures, disinfect floors, and dispense hand sanitizer to fight the coronavirus. The goal is to maintain sanitation while reducing people-to-people contact in buildings. Developers SK Telecom and Omron Electronics Korea plan to deploy the robot at their headquarters and then global markets in 2021.

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• The self-driving bot, equipped with an LED screen and cameras, uses AI, autonomous driving, and IoT technologies.
• Its thermal imaging camera detects temperatures and sends out an alert if someone is 37.5°C (99.5°F) or higher.
• The robot uses AI to detect gatherings of people and advises them to social distance and put on face masks.
• It automatically disinfects surfaces using UV lamps and two-floor disinfectant sprayers.

A Swedish hedge fund known as Volt Capital Management AB says it's using a unique AI program to boost its returns for investors. The Volt Diversified Alpha Program combines fundamental models with machine learning. This year, investors have received a 24% return compared to the fund's target of 10%, which the company attributed largely to the machine learning models.

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• The company, which focuses on short-term investments, has $30m under management.
• Jukka Harju, former head of research at Lynx Asset Management, developed the AI program for Volt in 2017.
• The fund’s chief investment officer, Patrik Safvenblad, says his models for the AI program positioned the fund for the oil markets slump gains in the dollar and bonds.
• Volt’s analyses predict that the global economy will remain weak, with volatile commodities and equity markets.

SoftBank Vision Fund 2 led a $500m investment in Didi Chuxing’s autonomous driving division. Didi will use the funds to improve the safety of the self-driving vehicle it is developing, as well as coordinating expanded road tests and continue R&D.

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• Didi’s autonomous unit was spun off into an independent company last year.
• Vision Fund 2 reportedly fell short of its $108b fundraising goal, which means the fund may be less than half of its planned size.
• SoftBank’s first Vision Fund reportedly “embarrassed” founder Masayoshi Son, after massive investments in Uber and WeWork, which failed to deliver.

A version of this story first appeared in our newsletter Inside Transportation.

More Of Today's Top AI Stories:

• Bluware, an oil-field software firm, inked a deal with oil giant BP to use its deep learning technology to analyze seismic data from oil wells.
• AI applications will reach $128.9B by 2025, up from $42.8B last year, with the AI processor market growing to a comparable $68.5B by the mid-2020s.
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New job postings in AI/ML:

Big Data & AI Postdoctoral Researcher
Baidu USA | Sunnyvale, Calif.

AI Research Engineer
Baidu USA | Sunnyvale, Calif. or Bellevue, Wash.

Senior AI Researcher
Baidu USA | Sunnyvale, Calif.

Tweet of the Day

Digital transformation adviser @ingliguori shared an infographic showing how AI will impact lives in the 2020s: