Issue 16: AI Writes a Play, Hugging Face’s High-profile Hire, New Text-to-speech Model from Google

In issue #16 of The Comet Newsletter, several advancements in machine learning and AI are highlighted, including Hugging Face's hiring of Margaret Mitchell, a former Google AI Ethics Researcher, to enhance its ethical framework. The newsletter discusses a creative endeavor where AI, using GPT-3, attempted to write a play at London's Young Vic theatre, resulting in a mix of outcomes but offering some intriguing "almost human insights." It also covers Victor Dibia's exploration of extractive text summarization, contrasting it with abstractive summarization and redefining it as a sentence classification task. Furthermore, Google AI's development of the PnG NAT model, which combines PnG BERT and Non-Attentive Tacotron for improved text-to-speech synthesis, is presented as a significant step towards enhancing AI-assisted speech fluency and quality.