The Information reports that Seattle-based Xnor.ai played a role in the Pentagon’s controversial Project Maven, but that Apple ended Xnor.ai’s involvement in the project after acquiring the startup.
Tag: Artificial Intelligence
If the sun throws out a radiation blast of satellite-killing proportions someday, Amazon Web Services may well play a role in heading off a technological doomsday.
That’s the upshot of a project that has NASA working with AWS Professional Services and the Amazon Machine Learning Solutions Lab to learn more about the early warning signs of a solar superstorm, with the aid of artificial intelligence.
Seattle’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence is kicking things up more than a notch for AI startups with a $10 million pre-seed fund for its incubator program.
The AI2 Incubator’s fund is backed by some of the nation’s top venture capital institutions, such as Seattle’s Madrona Venture Group, Silicon Valley’s Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins, and New York’s Two Sigma Ventures.
But wait … there’s more: The fund also draws upon high-profile investors and mentors including Tableau Software CEO Adam Selipsky, Drive.ai co-founder Carol Reiley and Amazon Worldwide Consumer CEO Jeff Wilke.
The new fund announcement comes just a day after GeekWire first reported Apple’s acquisition of Xnor.ai, a Seattle startup incubated inside of AI2.
By Alan Boyle, Taylor Soper and Todd Bishop
Apple has acquired Xnor.ai, a Seattle startup specializing in low-power, edge-based artificial intelligence tools, sources with knowledge of the deal told GeekWire.
The acquisition echoes Apple’s high-profile purchase of Seattle AI startup Turi in 2016. Speaking on condition of anonymity, sources said Apple paid an amount similar to what was paid for Turi, in the range of $200 million.
Xnor.ai didn’t immediately respond to our inquiries, while Apple emailed us its standard response on questions about acquisitions: “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.” (The company sent the exact same response when we broke the Turi story.)
When we visited Xnor.ai’s office in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood this morning, a move was clearly in progress — presumably to Apple’s Seattle offices.
The arrangement suggests that Xnor’s AI-enabled image recognition tools could well become standard features in future iPhones and webcams.
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Study: AI takes aim at high-paying jobs
When experts talk about the disruptive effects of artificial intelligence, they tend to focus on low-paid laborers — but a newly published study suggests higher-paid, more highly educated workers will be increasingly exposed to job challenges.
The study puts Seattle toward the top of the list for AI-related job disruption.
The analysis, which draws on work by researchers at Stanford University and the Brookings Institution, makes use of a novel technique that connects AI-related patents with the job descriptions for different professions.
He promised he’d be back — and 35 years after Arnold Schwarzenegger created what’s now a cliche for artificial intelligence gone wrong in the first “Terminator” movie, the cinematic nightmares about time-traveling killer robots have returned to the big screen.
“Terminator: Dark Fate” also marks the return of writer/producer James Cameron — who directed the first two movies in the franchise, but wasn’t involved in the three sequels that followed. Cameron skips over those films and reboots the saga with an alternate timeline for the robo-apocalypse.
Although monstrous machines have figured in movie plots since Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” in 1927, Schwarzenegger’s performance in “The Terminator” set the stage for worries about out-of-control intelligent machines.
Billionaire techie Elon Musk is among the best-known doomsayers. “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,” Musk said in 2017.
On the other side of the debate, Oren Etzioni, the CEO of Seattle’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, or AI2, keeps telling people to calm down. “Even though AI is more and more being used, I want to reassure people that Skynet and Terminator are not around the corner for many, many reasons,” he told GeekWire in 2016.
Does the new “Terminator” movie update the saga with all the developments in AI, automation and robotics since 1984? How does “Dark Fate” stack up against the realities of our AI age? To get some informed perspectives, I invited two folks who work in the field to watch the movie with me — and share their thoughts afterward.
Seattle’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence says its academic search engine, Semantic Scholar, is now in high gear — thanks to a power boost from Microsoft that helped expand its reach to every field of science.
Over the course of just a few months, Semantic Scholar’s database has gone from indexing 40 million research papers in computer science and biomedicine to taking in more than 175 million papers. The database not only covers the time-honored physical sciences, but also political science and sociology, art and philosophy.
“That’s enabled us to take the research that we’ve done in making AI a tool for overcoming information overload in science [and turn it into] a tool that is now usable by, essentially all scholars around the world,” Doug Raymond, general manager of Semantic Scholar, told GeekWire.
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is joining forces with two other research powerhouses to pioneer a new $5.5 million research center created by the U.S. Department of Energy to focus on the biggest challenges in artificial intelligence.
The Center for Artificial Intelligence-Focused Architectures and Algorithms, or ARIAA, will promote collaborative projects for scientists at PNNL in Richland, Wash., at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, and at Georgia Tech. PNNL and Sandia are part of the Energy Department’s network of research labs.
ARIAA will be headed by Roberto Gioiosa, a senior research scientist at PNNL. As center director, he’ll be in charge of ARIAA’s overall vision, strategy and research direction. He’ll be assisted by two deputy directors, Sandia’s Rajamanickam and Georgia Tech Professor Tushar Krishna.
The creation of the new center is in line with the White House’s efforts to encourage partnerships in AI research. Last month, Energy Secretary Rick Perry announced the establishment of the DOE Artificial Intelligence and Technology Office to serve as a coordinating hub for all the work that’s being done in his department.
Physicians and regulators keep close tabs on how different drugs interact. But what about interactions involving dietary supplements?
“There’s just no way for anybody to keep up with the combinations of supplements and drugs,” said Deborah Rappaport, vice president of product at InHealth Medical Services. “It’s a huge number.”
Seattle’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, or AI2, is harnessing the power of its Semantic Scholar academic search engine to make the job easier. Today it unveiled Supp.AI, a searchable database that indexes 4,650 supplements and drugs from Abbokinase to Zytiga, and serves up research findings on more than 56,000 interactions involving those products.
Artificial intelligence is a big deal for the likes of Amazon, Microsoft and Google — but what about a small business that can’t afford to have a data scientist on staff?
That’s the niche that Bellevue, Wash.-based Kurvv plans to fill, with a service that takes a company’s data and fits it into a pre-trained AI model that may not be perfect, but is good enough to address the problem that needs solving.
“We’re targeting companies that have data, but don’t have the knowledge or the resources to hire data scientists and can’t bring in a consultant,” Kurvv’s CEO, Ryan Lee, told GeekWire.