Tag: Artificial Intelligence

Categories
GeekWire

Business is booming at two idea factories

Startup panel
AI2’s Jacob Colker gestures while Intellectual Ventures’ Azam Khan and Seven Peaks Ventures’ Dave Parker look on during a Seattle Startup Week session titled “Founders Wanted.” (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

Less than two months after Intellectual Ventures and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence put out the call for entrepreneurs, business is booming.

“We might be sitting here in a year telling you something very different, but right now, it’s like, ‘Come one, come all,’” Azam Khan, Intellectual Ventures’ director of new ventures, told a roomful of entrepreneurs at the University of Washington’s CoMotion Labs.

Jacob Colker, entrepreneur in residence at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, was similarly bullish. “I’m constantly looking for brilliant entrepreneurs, ideally some folks who have some scars on their back,” he said.

After the Oct. 5 talk, audience members swarmed around the two speakers as well as moderator Dave Parker, a venture partner at Seven Peaks Ventures. But what else would you expect at a Seattle Startup Week session titled “Founders Wanted”?

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

A user’s guide to tomorrow’s superintelligent AI

Life 3.0 cover illustration
“Life 3.0” focuses on what lies ahead in AI. (Suvadip Das Illustration, based on Netfalls Remy Musser)

Do we need to be concerned about the rapid rise of artificial intelligence? Some people say there’s nothing to worry about, while others warn that a Terminator-level nightmare is dead ahead.

MIT physicist Max Tegmark says both sides of that argument are exaggerations.

In his newly published book, “Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence,” Tegmark lays out a case for what he calls “mindful optimism” about beneficial AI — artificial intelligence that will make life dramatically better for humans rather than going off in unintended directions.

Tegmark, who’s also the co-founder and president of the Future of Life Institute, says AI won’t be beneficial unless it incorporates safety measures yet to be developed. That’s not because the machines are destined to turn against their masters. It’s because those masters are subject to the vagaries of human nature.

“To me, the really interesting question isn’t quibbling about whether to be optimistic or pessimistic,” he told GeekWire, “but rather to ask, ‘What useful things can we do today to create the best possible future?’”

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

IBM and MIT partner up to boost AI research

Image: IBM Watson
IBM’s Watson AI software is best-known for winning at “Jeopardy!” in 2011. (Credit: IBM)

IBM is making a 10-year, $240 million investment in artificial intelligence research through a new lab it’s creating in partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The investment will support research by IBM and MIT scientists at the newly created MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab in Cambridge, Mass., the two partners announced today.

“Through this collaboration, we will target innovations that will move us beyond specialized tasks to more general approaches to solving more complex problems, with the added capability of robust, continuous learning,” Dario Gil, IBM Research’s vice president of AI and IBM Q, said in a blog post.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Elon Musk hails AI bot’s video game victory

USB stick
A security staff member at The International Dota 2 Championships holds up a plug-in USB stick for an AI bot programmed to play esports. Dota 2 master Dendi stands onstage in the background, waiting to do battle in Seattle. (OpenAI via YouTube)

The Dota 2 esports tournament in Seattle, known as The International, demonstrates how video games have become hugely popular team sports — and today alpha geek Elon Musk took the occasion to tout a different kind of team effort.

Musk, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, is also a big supporter of OpenAI, a nonprofit research company aimed at boosting artificial intelligence architectures and applications that benefit humanity.

Today, OpenAI showed off an AI bot that vanquished Danylo “Dendi” Ishutin, one of the world’s top Dota 2 players, in a one-vs.-one demonstration match.

“OK, this guy is scary,” Ishutin said as he battled the bot’s minions. The crowd at KeyArena groaned when the bot crushed Ishutin’s game avatars.

Ishutin was beaten badly in the first match, forfeited a second match, and refused to play a third.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

AI2 challenge puts computer vision to the test

Charades Challenge
For AI2’s Charades Challenge, visual systems had to recognize and classify a wide variety of daily activities in realistic videos. This is just a sampling of the videos. (AI2 Photos)

Some of the world’s top researchers in AI have proved their mettle by taking top honors in three challenges posed by the Seattle-based Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

The institute, also known as AI2, was created by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen in 2014 to blaze new trails in the field of artificial intelligence. One of AI2’s previous challenges tested the ability of AI platforms to answer eighth-grade-level science questions.

The three latest challenges focused on visual understanding – that is, the ability of a computer program to navigate real-world environments and situations using synthetic vision and machine learning.

These aren’t merely academic exercises: Visual understanding is a must-have for AI applications ranging from self-driving cars to automated security monitoring to sociable robots.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Zuck and Musk trade zingers over AI fears

Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg
Tech billionaires Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are feuding over AI. (SpaceX / Facebook Photos)

Techies, grab some popcorn: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and SpaceX/Tesla CEO Elon Musk are throwing shade at each other over what Musk considers the scariest issue facing humanity: the rapid rise of artificial intelligence.

It all started last week at the National Governors Association’s summer meeting in Rhode Island, where Musk complained that policymakers and tech leaders weren’t sufficiently worried about AI.

“I keep sounding the alarm bell, but until people see robots going down the street, killing people, they don’t know how to react because it seems so ethereal,” he said.

Over the weekend, Zuckerberg basically said Musk was being reckless.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Elon Musk on self-driving cars and AI’s perils

Elon Musk
Elon Musk surveys the future of technology during a fireside chat at the National Governors Association summer meeting. (C-SPAN via YouTube)

In the year 2037, non-autonomous vehicles will be as much of a curiosity as riding a horse is today, tech billionaire Elon Musk says.

Musk also says that the rapid rise of artificial intelligence is “really like the scariest problem for me,” and that the government has to set up something like the Federal Artificial Intelligence Administration before it’s too late.

The CEO of SpaceX and Tesla laid out his latest vision for the future of transportation, AI and space exploration over the weekend at the National Governors Association’s summer meeting in Providence, R.I. Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval, whose state hosts Tesla’s first battery-producing Gigafactory, served as the emcee for the July 15 fireside chat.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Boeing HorizonX backs SparkCognition AI

Predictive maintenance for wind turbines
One of SparkCognition’s AI products, SparkPredict, is designed to predict wind turbine failures before they occur. (SparkCognition via YouTube)

Boeing’s recently established venture arm, HorizonX, has joined with other investors in a $32.5 million funding round for SparkCognition, a Texas-based company focusing on artificial intelligence and machine learning in the fields of information technology security and industrial operations.

The Series B round is being led by Verizon Ventures. Boeing said it was among a group of strategic investors in SparkCognition, which counts aerospace and defense among its target markets.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

How AI picks up our all-too-human biases

AI demonstration
Princeton researcher Aylin Caliskan demonstrates how Google’s automatic translation program shows signs of gender bias. (Princeton University via YouTube / Aaron Nathans)

There’s fresh evidence that artificial intelligence software absorbs human biases about race and gender, and it may be due to the very structure of languages.

Scientists came to that conclusion after creating a statistical system for scoring the positive and negative connotations associated with words in AI-analyzed texts.

A similar system, known as the Implicit Association Test or IAT, has suggested that humans harbor biases about the comparative status of different races, as well as men and women, even though they don’t explicitly acknowledge them.

Princeton University’s Aylin Caliskan and her colleagues adapted the IAT for a textual analysis tool they call the Word-Embedding Association Test, or WEAT. They describe the method, and its application, in research published today by the journal Science.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Elon Musk backs venture to link brains and AI

Elon Musk
Elon Musk muses at SpaceX’s Mission Control. (SpaceX Photo)

Billionaire brainiac Elon Musk is following up on his interest in (and wariness about) artificial intelligence by backing Neuralink Corp., a company devoted to developing neural implants, The Wall Street Journal says.

Business filings suggest that Neuralink would build devices designed to treat or diagnose neurological conditions, and conceivably augment human cognitive powers.

The Journal quoted entrepreneur-futurist Max Hodak as confirming Musk’s involvement in Neuralink, which Hodak said was still an “embryonic” venture.

Get the full story on GeekWire.