Cosmic Log
It’s a thrilling time for technology, with innovations in artificial intelligence and robotics propelling society ever faster forward. But is it too fast?
That’s a question that came up more than once on March 21 during a panel discussion on automation’s impacts on society and work, presented at Seattle University by the MIT Enterprise Forum of the Northwest.
It’s high time for government officials to get up to speed on the promise and potential pitfalls of artificial intelligence, two U.S. senators leading the charge said today.
“I think we’re entering an age where artificial intelligence is going to provide great benefits,” Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., said during an AI conference presented in Washington, D.C., as part of The Washington Post’s Transformers program.
Cantwell compared the state of the AI field to the state of the internet or the drone industry during the early days, when policymakers weren’t completely sure how those technologies were going to be used.
Sen. Todd Young, R-Ind., acknowledged that members of Congress aren’t sufficiently equipped to deal with all of the issues raised by AI. “I like a measure of humility from our legislators,” he said.
To remedy that gap, Cantwell and Young are among the sponsors of a bill known as the FUTURE of AI Act. (The title is an acronym standing for “Fundamentally Understanding The Usability and Realistic Evolution of Artificial Intelligence.”)
Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s new $125 million initiative to give artificial intelligence programs more common sense has another goal that’s closer to home: making AI safer for humans.
That’s the way Oren Etzioni, the CEO of the Seattle-based Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, explained it in an exclusive interview with GeekWire about Project Alexandria.
Is technical expertise the key to success in the fast-moving world of artificial intelligence market? Or is it entrepreneurship?
Top-notch engineers with a yen to build a startup can get the best of both worlds through a newly created CTO residency program at Seattle’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, or AI2.
“Google has DeepMind, Facebook has FAIR, Microsoft has Microsoft Research AI,” Jacob Colker, managing director of the AI2 Incubator, told GeekWire. “But AI2 is one of the few places where entrepreneurs and early-stage startups can access the same kind of talent that’s available to the big guys.”
Want to order up a drawing? Say you want a picture of a bird with a yellow crown and black rings around its eyes. Or a still life showing swirls of pasta with broccoli, carrots and onions.
Now there’s a bot for that.
Researchers have enlisted artificial intelligence tools, including computer vision and natural language processing, to program a “drawing bot” that can create a picture from the ground up, based merely on a descriptive caption.
G’day, Alexa: Amazon’s digital voice assistant is getting an Australian accent for its Down Under debut this week, but there’s more in store for users around the world.
Thanks to SSML, or speech synthesis markup language, Alexa developers can already make an Amazon Echo or other voice-controlled device whisper, or speak faster or slower, or speak with a super-cheery voice. And Alexa’s users can change her speaking style to British English, or German, or Japanese.
Like Google’s AI assistant, Alexa can now associate voices with specific people: Users can follow the instructions in the Alexa mobile app to train devices so that they distinguish your voice from others.
Outside developers will be getting access to that feature, known as the Your Voice API. That means voice identification could soon be popping up in third-party skills, said Nikko Strom, a senior principal scientist at Amazon and founding member of the Alexa team.
A California-based AI startup called ClusterOne is moving its headquarters to Seattle to become the latest venture to benefit from the incubator program at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence.
“Allen AI makes a lot of sense for us, because they have the best researchers in AI,” ClusterOne co-founder and CEO Mohsen Hejrati told GeekWire. “They are investors and incubators, but more importantly, they are great partners in research … the best partners we could get.”
First word of the team-up came today from Oren Etzioni, the institute’s CEO, during the AI NextCon conference in Bellevue, Wash.
“Today, we’re just announcing for the first time that a company called ClusterOne, which was founded by some ex-Google folks in California — they’re moving to Seattle, joining our incubator,” Etzioni told the crowd.
BELLEVUE, Wash. — Don’t expect Microsoft’s consumer software to hype its artificial-intelligence features. For the most part, the AI smarts are under the hood.
“If you do a good job infusing AI into your products, your customers don’t know you’ve done that. The products just work better,” Steve Guggenheimer, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for AI business, told attendees at the AI NextCon conference here today. “You don’t actually go do a bunch of advertising and say, ‘Office, Now With AI!’ That’s not how it works.”
But rest assured, it’s there.
Computer scientists have created artificial-intelligence algorithms that are at least as good as trained humans at recognizing the signs of skin cancer or malaria, but does that mean your future physician will be a bot?
Two experts on AI explain in the journal Science why the rapid rise of machine learning could be good for well-paid professionals like dermatologists and epidemiologists, no big deal for workers on the low end of the wage spectrum, but big trouble for employees in the middle.
That’s because those middle-spectrum jobs are particularly vulnerable to the machine-learning treatment, MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson and Carnegie Mellon University’s Tom Mitchell say.
You got to know when to hold ’em, and know when to fold ’em — and when it comes to betting on human superiority in the game of poker, it may be time to fold ’em.
Carnegie Mellon University researchers laid their cards on the table in a study published this week in the journal Science, explaining how they designed their Libratus AI program to beat four professional poker players in no-limit Texas Hold’em.
It’s one more domino to fall in a series of human vs. machine gaming experiments — starting with checkers and chess, and moving on to the ancient board game known as Go.