Items tagged with artificial-intelligence
It's been no secret that Tesla's Elon Musk is worried about advanced artificial intelligence getting into the wrong hands. He's even put his money where his mouth is with those concerns, and last year founded OpenAI, an organization with no competitive nature that aims to make sure AI benefits all of mankind. Being that Musk is so worried about AI finding its way into the wrong hands, many have been keen on knowing who or what company he's most concerned about. Well, at Code Conference 2016, he enlightened us. "There's only one." What could that singular cause for concern be? Unfortunately, we're not going to find out - at least not yet - as Musk simply refused to say a name. It's definitely...
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When Amazon infused its Alexa digital assistant into a cylindrical device and called it Echo, many were left scratching their heads. "Who on Earth would need such a thing?" Well, Echo might be the perfect example of something you don't realize is cool, or useful, until you actually use it. If you want proof that Echo has merit (in addition to reading our review), just take a look at all of the other companies making similar products. Apparently, even Apple is planning on getting in on the action. According to CNET, Apple's Echo fighter could come in the form if a simple speaker just like Amazon's product, but the Cupertino company could one-up Echo and every other competitor by including a camera...
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Microsoft has been at the forefront of the machine-learning craze, having developed demos that are both neat and useful. About a year ago, the company released a tool that took a guess at your age, and just this past fall, it created a tool to help identify your emotions. The company has even developed a solution that can give a computer a sense of humor. There's seemingly no limit to where machine-learning can take us. Not all in this machine-learning realm can be perfect, though. Just last month, Microsoft had to pull a Twitter bot it called "Tay" from the internet after people managed to manipulate its "thoughts" for the worse. In no time, Tay became racist and sex-crazed, and we're pretty...
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If you're a fan of travel, you're probably going to love what Google has been up to lately. As we've covered many times, Google is no stranger to machine-learning and developing complex and powerful neural networks of computer resources. Now, the company has decided to focus on geography as well as testing you, not only its own neural network. Google's Tobias Weyand, with the help of other engineers, has developed a neutral network that helps pinpoint exactly where in the world a photograph was taken. For things like landmarks, this wouldn't be too complicated. But what about inside someone's home? Inside a shopping mall? On an ordinary road like the one below? The image above was pulled...
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As we've talked about a number of times in the past, Google is very keen on taking good advantage of deep-learning to help accomplish some amazing things. Its latest venture could affect us in a very direct way: by making it easier to search for specific photos in our collection. Object identification is already a big part of Google's business; it's why the company's search engine is so eerily accurate at times. It knows the difference between "small" and "large", different types of very similar objects, colors, and so forth. With a partnership with Movidius, which is headquartered in San Mateo, California, Google will pack a special chip in some future smartphones that add acceleration to image...
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It might sound odd, but what if the only way to rapidly improve something was to kill off most of what we have? We're talking something so grim, I almost hate to write it: mass extinction. The idea is that if a large part of the population is purged, it'll inevitably speed up the evolutionary process of surviving persons. Fortunately, there are no planned tests of such a theory outside of a computer simulation, such as one some scientists at the University of Texas in Austin developed. Through much testing, Risto Miikkulainen and Joel Lehman discovered that when most of the learned information in a walking simulation was destroyed, the remaining AI began to evolve at a much quicker pace. As with...
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Computer learning has helped a multitude of different technologies become a reality, with one in particular being emotion-detection. Most examples I've seen in the past have been simple, though, such as being able to detect a smile or a frown - something that shouldn't be that challenging. But with today's super-fast computers, and even mobile devices, we're now able to detect emotion with far greater granularity. To see an example, we just have to turn to facial recognition expert Rana el Kaliouby. She gave a talk at TED last month to highlight just how accurate emotion-detection has become, and depending on your perspective, the result is either amazing, or downright scary. I highly encourage...
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We may not have even hit the middle of 2015 yet, but it seems certain that one of the most-used tech buzzwords of the year is going to be "machine learning". While the idea behind getting computers to teach themselves is nothing new, the focus on it has been recently amplified. At March's GPU Technology Conference, NVIDIA spent a lot of time talking about machine learning, and since then, both Amazon and Microsoft have talked it up, as well. Now, it's Wolfram Alpha's turn. In a new blog post, company founder Stephen Wolfram touts a new feature that he's waited many decades for. It's called ImageIdentify, and it's designed to tell you exactly what you're looking at. Feed it a picture of a cheetah?...
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If there's one man who understands all the potential of artificial intelligence, it's Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk. You might recall that this past fall, we wrote about one of Musk's comments regarding how future AI developments could lead us to "[summon] the demon". Quite simply, we don't want a "Skynet" to happen. In the 80s, the mere thought of that would have sounded ridiculous, but today? Things have certainly changed.Elon Musk stares at a robot at Tesla'a manufacturing facility in Fremont, California (Source: Steve Jurvetson) Musk is now willing to convert his concerns into funding in order to make sure that Skynet never comes to fruition. With...
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When it comes to science fiction, the idea that artificial intelligence could be the cause of the human race’s extinction is a concept that has been used many times. For example, The Matrix and Terminator franchises depict futures where mankind is dominated, or being driven to extinction, by machines when the AI became self-aware. Now, as companies are creating thinking machines, Professor Stephen Hawking believes that such AI could threaten our existence. When responding to a question about the technology behind how he communicates, which involves a basic form of AI, Professor Hawking answered the question and proceeded to tell the BBC, “The development of full artificial intelligence could...
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Well, this isn’t good news (or else it’s awesome news, depending on how you look at it): An artificial intelligence software startup called Vicarious says that it can “reliably” (which is to say, 90% of the time) defeat text-based CAPTCHAs, those jumbled words and phrases that you have to decipher to prove that you’re a human online. This includes Google’s reCAPTCHA as well as those from Yahoo!, PayPal, Captcha.com, and more. Vicarious asserts that because of this, its software obviates CAPTCHAs as a Turing test, which sorts out who is a human and who is an AI robotic imposter. It appears as though Vicarious’ approach requires the software to use a certain...
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