DeepMind AlphaScale weighs shrooms from photos alone, turns out to be more accurate than any physical scale

DeepMind Technologies is known for their groundbreaking advancements of AI technology as demonstrated in its supremacy in several classic board games, as well as protein folding prediction and other simulations. Under pressure from it's parent company (Alphabet Inc, which also operates the entirety of Google) to actually do something useful for humanity, DeepMind has spent more than half of its resources during the past two years to develop and train a neural network to assess the weight of objects from photographs alone.

The service, named AlphaScale, is today only available to a select group of scientists and journalists. It has been criticised for being released prematurely, as it is displaying a general lack of precision. As an example, AlphaScale has been shown to more often then not determine the weight of common household items such as a banana or a drinking glass to weigh several megatons (several million tons), despite correctly identifying what the object actually is.

Strangely, the network has turned out to be very apt at determing the weight of both dried and fresh magic mushrooms. As it turns out, it is actually more correct than any weighing scale tested so far (how this has been determined is somewhat unclear but it does seem to be proven beyond any doubt).

DeepMind has declined to comment on whether this surprising asymmetry in the performance of AlphaScale reflects the focuse of their work, or if its just a curious artifact.