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Artificial intelligence
人工智能
Million-dollar babies
百万北鼻
As Silicon Valley fights for talent, universities struggle to hold on to their stars
硅谷争抢有天分的学生，大学拼命留住他们的学霸
THAT a computer program can repeatedly beat the world champion at Go, a complex board game, is a coup for the fast-moving field of artificial intelligence (AI). Another high-stakes game, however, is taking place behind the scenes, as firms compete to hire the smartest AI experts. Technology giants, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Baidu, are racing to expand their AI activities. Last year they spent some $8.5billion on research, deals and hiring, says Quid, a data firm. That was four times more than in 2010.
重点词汇：
1 coup 了不起的成就;成功之举
2 stake 赌注
3 Quid 一英镑 （创业企业名称）
听力原文:
In the past universities employed the world’s best AI experts. Now tech firms are plundering departments of robotics and machine learning (where computers learn from data themselves) for the highest-flying faculty and students, luring them with big salaries similar to those fetched by professional athletes.
重点词汇：
1 plunder 抢劫，掠夺
2 faculty and students 教职员和学生 faculty （高等院校中院、系的）全体教师
3 highflying （人）有成就的，有前途的
4 lure 劝诱；引诱；诱惑
5 fetch 卖得;售得， 去拿;去取;去接
听力原文:
Last year Uber, a taxi-hailing firm, recruited 40 of the 140 staff of the National Robotics Engineering Centre at Carnegie Mellon University, and set up a unit to work on self-driving cars. That drew headlines because Uber had earlier promised to fund research at the centre before deciding instead to peel off its staff. Other firms seek talent more quietly but just as doggedly. The migration to the private sector startles many academics. “I cannot even hold onto my grad students,” says Pedro Domingos, a professor at the University of Washington who specialises in machine learning and has himself had job offers from tech firms. “Companies are trying to hire them away before they graduate.”
重点词汇：
1 hail 招呼，叫（出租车）
2 peel 剥皮; 覆盖层脱落，剥落; n. 果皮
3 peel off 剥离
4 dogged 顽强的；坚持不懈的 [派生词]
5 doggedly顽强的；坚持不懈的
6 startle 使惊吓；使吓一跳；使大吃一惊
听力原文:
Experts in machine learning are most in demand. Big tech firms use it in many activities, from basic tasks such as spam-filtering and better targeting of online advertisements, to futuristic endeavours such as self-driving cars or scanning images to identify disease. As tech giants work on features such as virtual personal-assistant technology, to help users organise their lives, or tools to make it easier to search through photographs, they rely on advances in machine learning.
重点词汇：
1 spam 滥发的电邮；垃圾电邮
2 futuristic 极其现代的；未来派的
3 endeavour （尤指新的或艰苦的）努力，尝试
听力原文:
Tech firms’ investment in this area helps to explain how a once-arcane academic gathering, the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, held each December in Canada, has become the Davos of AI. Participants go to learn, be seen and get courted by bosses looking for talent. Attendance has tripled since 2010, reaching 3,800 last year.
重点词汇：
1 arcane 神秘的；晦涩难懂的
2 neural 神经的；神经系统的
3 Davos 达沃斯 （瑞士）
4 court （为有所求，尤指寻求支持而）试图取悦，讨好，争取
听力原文:
No reliable statistics exist to show how many academics are joining tech companies. But indications exist. In the field of “deep learning”, where computers draw insights from large data sets using methods similar to a human brain’s neuralnetworks, the share of papers written by authors with some corporate affiliation is up sharply (see chart). Tech firms have not always lavished such attention and resources on AI experts. The field was largely ignored and underfunded during the “AI winter” of the 1980s and 1990s, when fashionable approaches to AI failed to match their early promise. The present machine-learning boom began in earnest when Google started doing deals focused on AI. In 2014, for example, it bought DeepMind, the startup behind the computer’s victory in Go, from researchers in London. The price was rumoured to be around $600m. Around then Facebook, which also reportedly hoped to buy DeepMind, started a lab focused on artificial intelligence and hired an academic from New York University, Yann LeCun, to run it.
重点词汇：
1 indication 表明；标示；显示；象征，迹象;暗示
2 affiliation 隶属；从属
3 lavish adj 慷慨的；大方的 v 滥花；浪费；非常（或过分）慷慨地给予
4 earnest 郑重其事；当真
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