Category: Artificial Intelligence

Machines designed to exhibit reasoning, perception, planning, natural language processing, and subjugation of the human race.

Artificial Intelligence

Google’s Schmidt: Artificial intelligence needs to focus on real-world problems

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Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, soon to be reorganized as Alphabet, don’t get us started on that, says artificial intelligence needs to focus on real-world problems faced by humans.

“In order for AI to fulfil its long-term potential for society, we need to direct research even more toward real-world messiness: how do you help someone plan a last-minute great vacation when they’ve got limited budget, two picky kids, and only a few days to squeeze it into?”

Writing use cases is indeed the right way to build new products, so we give a thumbs up to this idea.

In addition to being a proponent for Agile methodology, though, Schmidt takes a great glancing swipe at Apple and its new music service, saying Ai could bolster discoverability pair you picky humans with music you’ll like, as opposed to an outdated approach in which you hire elitist experts to pick music for you. Curation, bad. Algorithms, good.

Read the article: BBC.com

More: Re/code

 

Artificial Intelligence

Kakao diversification now includes AI-enabled drones

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K Cube Ventures, in which South Korean tech firm Kakao (formerly Daum Kakao) owns a 10 percent stake, is placing bets on Internet of Things (IoT) and online-to-offline services. One of them is the reason why we use the Robopocalypse tag here: It’s investing 300M won (about US$250k) in UVify, a startup building artificial intelligence-enabled drones.

UVify is staffed by a team of mechanical and aerospace engineers from Seoul National University, according to the company, and its goal is to build drones “that can automatically operate without totally relying on humans,” according to BusinessKorea.

“Uvify has technological competitiveness in both hardware and software as it has been devoted to developing autonomous aircraft and robots in the past years,” — Chung Shina, partner, K Cube Ventures

UVify has also raised another 600M won from Korean state-run investment agencies.

Kakao has built a dominant mobile messaging service in Korea, KakaoTalk, but has struggled to gain any traction for that product outside Asia. The company recently bought Path, a US-based messaging service that has been lauded for a great user interface and approach to messaging, but also failed to make a dent in the North American market as Snapchat, Facebook Messenger, and others have established themselves. It’s not surprising to see diversification on Kakao’s part, and AI plus drones are smart bets. Or will end up enabling our doom. Or both.

More: BusinessKorea, Korea JoongAng Daily, beSuccess

Artificial Intelligence

Immortal You: Eter9 aims to create AI version of your personality

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You may remember this idea as the basis of Domhnall Gleeson’s excellent 2013 episode of “Black Mirror,” the Channel 4 series. If you haven’t seen the series, now’s the time to do so. Here’s the pertinent trailer:

Spoiler alert. Spoilers start… here!

In the episode, a woman mourning the abrupt death of her husband turns to a company that analyzes his social media posts, all the pics and video and text he posted, to create a virtual version of him. His personality formed the basis of a new AI that, for all intents and purposes, is him.

It’s such a good idea, a new startup, Eter9, aims to bring virtual versions of you to digital life. As in “Black Mirror,” the company will analyze your posts to create your digital replica, which it calls your Counterpart.

“The Counterpart is your Virtual Self that will stay in the system and interact with the world just like you would if you were present.”

As in, even if you, say, perish abruptly in an automobile accident, you’ll still be able to have furious arguments about politics with your distant relatives on Facebook. Which may be a huge positive. If you like the idea of trolling your distant relatives for the rest of digital eternity. Or at least until Eter9’s budget runs out.

More: International Business Times, BBC Newsbeat

Artificial Intelligence

Hot AI startup Vicarious adds Samsung to already impressive investor roster

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When your early stage startup attracts capital from Jerry Yang, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Ashton Kutcher, or Vinod Khosla, people tend to take notice. If you land all of them, you clearly have at least a great deck. Samsung thinks so, and now it’s joining those celeb investors in taking a piece of Vicarious, which says it is building the “next generation of [artificial intelligence] algorithms.”

Founder Dileep George told the India Times, “AI has many applications. Starting from optical character recognition to scanning receipts from hand-written notes and converting those to digital form and understanding what is written in the notes – that’s one example of an application that can have a big impact.”

More: Vicarious, Stuff.co.nz

 

Artificial Intelligence

Report: Artificial intelligence for enterprise may drive financial services, manufacturing

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Could an AI be your next hedge fund manager? Market intelligence firm Tractica predicts enterprise artificial intelligence revenue to hit US$11B in 2024, driven by applications for financial services, manufacturing, retail, and oil and gas.

“Tractica forecasts that annual revenue for enterprise applications of AI will increase from $202.5 million worldwide in 2015 to $11.1 billion in 2024, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 56.1%.”

AIE-15-chart

One of the biggest hurdles each industry must jump, Tractica notes, is the collection of clean, valid, accurate data.

“Although some data, such as pictures of cats, are freely abundant on the internet, other data is much rarer, which could prove a barrier to adoption for AI systems that need to make decisions based on reliable data.”

We will also need collectively to deal with the legal, ethical, and political ramifications of enterprise AI. To get back to our original question, could an AI legally manage a hedge fund? What happens when competing companies, with competing profit motives, employ the same, or different, AI entities?

More: Tractica.com

Artificial Intelligence

Social AI: Why the Robopocalypse is not imminent

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Prof. Justine Cassell, director of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon, on how “moral panics” about technology say more about how we think of ourselves than the actual technology being discussed. These moral panics aren’t new — Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ is a prime example. Prof. Cassell drops some great insight at the World Economic Forum.

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