Now the startup is unveiling a wireless device that’s designed to be clipped onto a retail shelf and send out an alert when the store is running low on a particular item.
The beta demonstration is due to take place this weekend in Las Vegas at Groceryshop, a trade show for the grocery industry.
Mackmyra’s Intelligens is billed as the first whisky created using AI. (Microsoft / Mackmyra Photo)
Computer scientists have tried using artificial intelligence to write poetry and compose music, with mixed results. But have they tried using it to make whisky?
We now know that they have, although drinkers in the U.S. will have to wait to judge how the AI experiment turned out.
Mackmyra, a Swedish whisky distillery, turned to Microsoft and a Finnish technology consulting firm called Fourkind to create novel whisky recipes for master blender Angela D’Orazio.
Jarno Kartela, principal machine learning partner at Fourkind, said in a Microsoft feature about the project that his company went with the cloud-based Azure platform and Machine Learning Studio “for its massive infrastructure … and its ease of deployment.”
The Aristo AI software has matched an eighth-grader’s ability to pass a science test. (AI2 Illustration)
Five years after the late Seattle billionaire Paul Allen challenged researchers to come up with an artificial intelligence program smart enough to pass an eighth-grade science test, that feat has been declared accomplished — by the hometown team.
There are caveats, of course: The exam, which was based on New York Regents aptitude tests, excluded questions that depended on interpreting pictures or diagrams. Those questions would have required visual interpretation skills that aren’t yet programmed into Aristo. Questions requiring a direct answer (that is, essay questions) were also left out. And for what it’s worth, Aristo would have been useless outside the areas of science in which it was trained.
Nevertheless, the exercise illustrated how far AI has come just since 2016, when all of the programs competing in the $80,000 Allen AI Science Challenge flunked.
Jack Ma and Elon Musk discuss the peril and promise of artificial intelligence at a Shanghai AI conference. (Xinhua via YouTube)
n the debate over artificial intelligence, whose side is Elon Musk on?
Musk, who’s in charge of SpaceX, Tesla and the Neuralink brain interface venture, sized up the odds with AliBaba founder Jack Ma today during a widely watched one-on-one session at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai.
The way Musk sees it, the prospects aren’t great for humans if future AI agents decide to go rogue. That’s despite pronouncements from AI researchers who say machines won’t match humans anytime soon when it comes to general intelligence, as opposed to specialized AI applications such as playing chess or Go.
“The biggest mistake I see artificial intelligence researchers making is assuming that they’re intelligent,” Musk said. “Yeah, they’re not, compared to AI. And so a lot of them cannot imagine something smarter than themselves.”
Musk said future AI agents will be “vastly smarter” than humans. “So what do you do with a situation like that?” he asked. “I’m not sure. I hope they’re nice.”
For his part, Ma saw more promise than peril in AI.
Boston Dynamics’ four-legged SpotMini robot may look scary as it shares the stage with company founder and CEO Marc Raibert at Amazon’s re:MARS conference in Las Vegas in June. But a report published this month praises Boston Dynamics’ owner, SoftBank, for confirming that it won’t develop technologies that could be used for military purposes. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)
Dutch activists are voicing concerns about technologies that could open the way for lethal autonomous weapons – such as AI software, facial recognition and swarming aerial systems – and are wondering where several tech titans including Amazon and Microsoft stand.
So are some AI researchers in the United States.
A report issued by Pax, a Dutch group that’s part of an international initiative known as the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, calls out Amazon, Microsoft and other companies for not responding to the group’s inquiries about their activities and policies in the context of lethal autonomous weapons.
“Why are companies like Microsoft and Amazon not denying that they’re currently developing these highly controversial weapons, which could decide to kill people without direct human involvement?” the report’s lead author, Frank Slijper, said this week in a news release. “Many experts warn that they would violate fundamental legal and ethical principles and would be a destabilizing threat to international peace and security.”
Optio3 CEO Sridhar Chandrashekar, far right, discusses issues surrounding artificial intelligence with moderator Melissa Hellmann of The Seattle Times, Dave Thurman of Northeastern University and Ben Wilson of Intellectual Ventures. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)
“Data is the new oil” may be a classic cliche characterizing how important raw numbers are for the computer industry, but when it comes to artificial intelligence ventures, the cliche may not go far enough.
“One of the big blocks for AI is data,” Ben Wilson, director of the Center for Intelligent Devices at Bellevue, Wash.-based Intellectual Ventures, said today at a forum about AI presented as part of the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce’s Executive Speaker Series. “Traditionally, startup companies need capital. Now, if you’re doing AI, you need capital and you also need data. And you’re going to burn through your data before you burn through your capital.”
Wilson pointed out that the big players in the AI market are the companies that have the data, whether it’s Amazon or Microsoft, Facebook or Google.
“Before you have a good idea, start with data,” he said. “And if you’re someone who has a great idea but you have no data, that’s going to be a big roadblock for you, and you’re going to have to find some collaborators or partners who have access to the data you need.”
High-performance computing is becoming the lifeblood of artificial intelligence research. (Intel Photo)
The development of ever more powerful models for artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the world, but it doesn’t come cheap. In a newly distributed position paper, researchers at Seattle’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence argue that more weight should be given to energy efficiency when evaluating research.
The AI2 researchers call on their colleagues to report the “price tag” associated with developing, training and running their models, alongside other metrics such as speed and accuracy. Research leaderboards, including AI2’s, regularly rate AI software in terms of accuracy over time, but they don’t address what it took to get those results.
Of course, cutting-edge research can be expensive in all sorts of fields, ranging from particle physics done at multibillion-dollar colliders to genetic analysis that requires hundreds of DNA sequencers. Financial cost or energy usage isn’t usually mentioned in the resulting studies. But AI2’s CEO, Oren Etzioni, says that times are changing – especially as the carbon footprint of energy-gobbling scientific experiments becomes more of a concern.
“It is an ongoing topic for many scientific communities, the issue of reporting costs,” Etzioni, one of the position paper’s authors, told GeekWire. “I think what makes a difference here is the stunning escalation that we’ve seen” in the resources devoted to AI model development.
One study from OpenAI estimates that the computational resources required for top-level research in deep learning have increased 300,000 times between 2012 and 2018, due to the rapid development of more and more complex models. “This is much faster than Moore’s Law, doubling every three or four months,” Etzioni said.
A view from Google Maps shows the building at 2101 N. 34th St. that’s due to serve as the new home for the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence’s startup incubator. (Google Maps Photo)
The startup incubator at Seattle’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence is getting so busy that it has to move into new digs across the street.
Starting Aug. 12, the incubator will occupy a 7,250-square-foot “long-term home” at 2101 N. 34th St., near Gasworks Park and AI2’s main offices on Northlake Way, the institute said in its email newsletter for friends and families.
“We anticipate having 50+ workstations for our EIRs and CTOs [entrepreneurs in residence and chief technology officers] — complemented by numerous team pods, phone booths, conference rooms, a classroom, a lounge and our own large outdoor deck overlooking Lake Union,” AI2 said.
Jacob Colker, a managing director for AI2’s incubator, told GeekWire in a follow-up email that the new space will be nearly four times bigger than the current 1,850-square-foot office space (above a dive shop that’s next door to AI2’s headquarters).
Semantic Scholar was pioneered at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. (AI2 Photo)
Today it’s mostly a man’s world in computer science — and a tally of the authors behind nearly 3 million research papers in the field suggests that could be the case for the rest of the 21st century.
The findings, reported by researchers at Seattle’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, point to how far the scientific community still has to go when it comes to gender equality in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM.
White House technology official Michael Kratsios addresses scores of executives, experts and officials at a White House summit focusing on artificial intelligence in 2018. (White House OSTP Photo / Erik Jacobs)
The Trump administration is updating the Obama administration’s strategy for artificial intelligence to put more emphasis on public-private partnerships like the one forged this year by Amazon and the National Science Foundation.
Three years after the initial strategic plan for AI research and development was released, the update was issued online overnight. It makes tweaks in the seven policy priorities that were laid out in the waning days of the Obama White House, and adds public-private partnerships as an eighth priority.
