Tag: Artificial Intelligence

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Ford invests in Argo AI for self-driving cars

An artist’s conception shows a Ford autonomous vehicle that has a heads-up display, but no steering wheel. (Ford via YouTube)
An artist’s conception shows a Ford autonomous vehicle that has a heads-up display, but no steering wheel. (Ford via YouTube)

Ford Motor Co. says it’s investing $1 billion over the next five years in a Pittsburgh startup called Argo AI to develop the virtual-driver system for Ford’s autonomous vehicles.

Argo AI was founded only a few weeks ago by CEO Bryan Salesky, who directed hardware development for Google’s self-driving cars; and chief operating officer Peter Rander, who led Uber’s program to develop self-driving cars.

Salesky and Rander, as well as other Argo AI executives, have worked on robotics and AI at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, which helps explain the placement of the startup’s headquarters.

The technology coming out of the collaboration could be licensed to other companies, Ford President and CEO Mark Fields said today in a statement announcing the deal.

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Should we hook up AI to our brains?

AI graphic
The Beneficial AI conference developed 23 guiding principles for AI. (Future of Life Institute)

Hundreds of AI researchers, business leaders and just plain geniuses have signed onto a statement of cautionary principles for artificial intelligence, including a requirement to build in the ability for human authorities to audit how an AI platform works.

The 23 Asilomar AI Principles were drawn up this month at the Beneficial AI conference, conducted in the same California locale where a famous meeting to define the limits of biotech was held in 1975.

This Asilomar conference focused on concerns about the rapid rise of AI, voiced by luminaries ranging from British physicist Stephen Hawking to Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla.

Musk called attention to the findings today in a series of tweets that ended up endorsing the idea of building AI tools into devices that interface with the human brain.

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Philanthropic venture acquires AI startup

Meta chart
Meta says its search tool traces connections involving 17 million researchers. (Meta via YouTube)

The multibillion-dollar Chan Zuckerberg Initiative announced its first acquisition today: a startup called Meta that is developing an artificial intelligence program for searching through scientific studies.

“We will be working to make Meta even more powerful and useful to the scientific community, and are committed to offering these tools and features for free to all researchers,” the initiative’s president of science, Cori Bargmann, and chief technology officer Brian Pinkerton said in a Facebook posting.

The acquisition is subject to shareholder and court approval.

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Microsoft’s CEO sees AI’s down side for jobs

Satya Nadella
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella talks about the “upscaling” effect of AI at the DLD tech conference in Munich. (DLD via YouTube)

Experts on employment trends have long raised concerns about how job markets are being disrupted so quickly by artificial intelligence and automation are disrupting the job market, and now it sounds as if Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella shares those concerns.

Nadella has made AI one of the pillars of Microsoft’s future growth. But during today’s fireside chat at the DLD tech conference in Munich, he acknowledged that the technology comes with moral imperatives attached. It’s not enough to create AI tools that make more money for Microsoft, he said.

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$27 million fund backs research in AI’s impact

Image: AI brain
Experts say human intelligence and artificial intelligence are likely to work together in the decades ahead. (Credit: Christine Daniloff / MIT file)

LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and Omidyar Network anchor a newly formed $27 million fund to support research into the social impacts of artificial intelligence.

Hoffman and Omidyar are each kicking in $10 million to get the Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Fund started. The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation has committed $5 million more. And there are $1 million contributions from James Pallotta, the investor who founded the Raptor Group; and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Awards will be made from the fund to support a global cross-section of research aimed at applying the humanities, social sciences and other disciplines to the development of AI for the public interest. The MIT Media Lab and Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society will serve as the initiative’s founding academic institutions.

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AlphaGo beats Go masters in stealth games

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The AI program known as AlphaGo has mastered the game of Go. (Credit: Google DeepMind)

For the past week or so, a mystery player has been logging into online Go game servers and beating the world’s best. Today, the player’s identity was revealed at last.

It was none other than AlphaGo, the artificial-intelligence program that triumphed over Go master Lee Sedol last March in a widely publicized $1 million showdown.

Google DeepMind’s co-founder and CEO, Demis Hassabis, let the world in on the secret today in a tweeted statement.

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Obama White House issues its last word on AI

Obama at White House
President Barack Obama sits for a 3-D portrait being produced by the Smithsonian Institution. (White House Photo / Pete Souza)

Dealing with the coming revolution in artificial intelligence is likely to require modernizing America’s social safety net, White House experts said today, in what may well be the Obama administration’s last official word on the subject.

The White House report, “Artificial Intelligence, Automation and the Economy,” follows up on a series of workshops that started out in Seattle and resulted in a roundup of policy recommendations issued in October.

Today’s report focuses on the potential economic impacts of AI, and draws upon analyses from the Council of Economic Advisers, the Domestic Policy Council, the National Economic Council, the Office of Management and Budget, and the Office of Science and Technology Policy.

The opportunities offered by AI are likely to be a key driver for future productivity and wage growth, said Jason Furman, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.

“As we look at AI, our biggest economic concern is that we won’t have enough of it,” he told reporters during a teleconference.

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Universe lets AI agents practice computer skills

Dusk Drive game
Universe makes it possible for an AI agent to play Flash games like Dusk Drive. (OpenAI Graphic)

If you were weirded out by HBO’s “Westworld,” hold onto your cowboy hats: OpenAI, the artificial intelligence lab backed by Elon Musk and other tech gurus, has released a software platform called Universe that lets AI agents use computers the way humans do.

Universe’s first mission? Master thousands of video games and real-world browser tasks.

The idea is to train AI agents to hone their general-intelligence skills by exposing them to a huge number of computer-based environments, over and over again.

“Our goal is to develop a single AI agent that can flexibly apply its past experience on Universe environments to quickly master unfamiliar, difficult environments, which would be a major step towards general intelligence,” OpenAI says in a blog post announcing Universe’s release.

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Study: AI will change our lives but won’t kill us

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Experts say human intelligence and artificial intelligence are likely to work together in the decades ahead, and that will pose a challenge for public policy. (Credit: Christine Daniloff / MIT file)

A 100-year project conceived by Microsoft Research’s Eric Horvitz to trace the impacts of artificial intelligence has issued its first report: a 28,000-word analysislooking at how AI technologies will affect urban life in 2030.

The bottom line? Put away those “Terminator” nightmares of a robot uprising, at least for the next 15 years – but get ready for technological disruptions that will make life a lot easier for many of us while forcing some of us out of our current jobs.

That assessment comes from Stanford University’s One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence, or AI100, which is Horvitz’s brainchild. Horvitz, a Stanford alumnus, is a former president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and the managing director of Microsoft Research’s Redmond lab.

Horvitz and his wife, Mary, created the AI100 endowment with the aim of monitoring AI’s development and effects over the coming century. The 2030 report represents a first look at AI applications across eight domains of human activity.

“This process will be a marathon, not a sprint, but today we’ve made a good start,” Russ Altman, a bioengineering professor who is AI100’s Stanford faculty director,said today in a news release.

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IBM’s Watson makes AI trailer about AI movie

Image: Morgan
IBM’s Watson AI software selected creepy moments for a trailer touting the AI thriller “Morgan,” including this close-up of the Morgan AI. How meta! (Credit: 20th Century Fox / IBM)

Experts may reassure us that artificial intelligence won’t take over the world anytime soon – but they just might invade the multiplex.

At least that’s the plot developing at IBM, where the Watson artificial-intelligence team programmed a computer to come up with a scary trailer for “Morgan,” a thriller about a genetically modified, AI-enhanced super-human.

GeekWire’s crack team of movie critics gave “Morgan” an average grade of C – but I have to say Watson’s trailer gave me the creeps. Maybe it’s the way short cuts are spliced together to create a sense of ominousness without revealing what the heck is going on. Maybe it’s the eerie music. Or maybe it’s just knowing that a faceless piece of software helped create it.

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