The first day of the Brains vs. AI poker tournament is in the books, and the Libratus bot from Carnegie Mellon University emerged as the clear winner, collecting $81,716 to the humans $7,228. Both the players and Libratus’ creators cautioned that it was still too early to make a judgement call about who might win the 20-day tournament. But it’s clear that this year’s AI has made some major improvements on the 2015 system, Claudico, which ended up losing to humanity.
In a sound-proofed hangar on an RAF airbase just north of Cambridge, UK, Chris Mitchell and his colleagues are busy using sledgehammers to teach their computers a lesson. The team has gathered thousands of window panes and doors, all of different shapes and sizes, which they then smash, one by one, recording the distinctive shattering sound of each type of glass. Sometimes they swing sledgehammers or garden spades, sometimes they throw bricks. “We completely underestimated the mess it would make,” says Mitchell. “And how tiring it would be.”
Continue reading… “Here’s why an AI firm is smashing windows”
The McDonald’s on the corner of Third Avenue and 58th Street in New York City doesn’t look all that different from any of the fast-food chain’s other locations across the country. Inside, however, hungry patrons are welcomed not by a cashier waiting to take their order, but by a “Create Your Taste” kiosk – an automated touch-screen system that allows customers to create their own burgers without interacting with another human being.
Continue reading… “Robots will destroy our jobs and we’re not even ready for it”
There’s a big temptation for businesses to use artificial intelligence to shave off time and money wherever they can. According to experts, that’s not the smartest use of the technology.
Continue reading… “Are you going to lose your job to AI? Here’s what experts really think”
2016 was a banner year for artificial intelligence. Alpha Go’s victory over Lee Sedol was perhaps one of the most important, but we saw advancements in self-driving cars, the continued embrace of bots and personal assistants for retail, adoption and competition around in-house assistants like Amazon Echo, along with frequent, sometimes weekly, breakthroughs on the academic side, mainly relating to machine learning. With the biggest tech companies in the world–Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, and others–devoting more and more resources to AI, the momentum is going to increase.
Imagine that you could have superhero vision, seeing in not only what we know as the visible spectrum, but using wavelengths that allow you to see through fog, and detect black ice. Or imagine a Star Trek-like medical tricorder that could take a tiny bit of body fluid and determine what was ailing you.
A Japanese company is making 34 employees redundant in order to replace them with IBM’s Watson Explorer AI. Human workers at Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance are set to be replaced by an artificial intelligence that can calculate payouts to policyholders.
Continue reading… “Japanese company replaces workers with AI”
BMW unveiled a concept for the interior of driverless cars on Wednesday at a press conference in Las Vegas at CES. The concept, dubbed the BMWi Inside Future, showcases how BMW envisions its autonomous vehicles may look when they start to hit the market. The interior concept is centered on connectivity and includes a panoramic display that can be operated just like a touchscreen — except physical contact isn’t necessary.
Continue reading… “BMW unveils futuristic concept for the interior of its driverless cars”
Over the last several decades, the digital revolution has changed nearly every aspect of our lives. The pace of progress in computers has been accelerating, and today, computers and networks are in nearly every industry and home across the world.
Continue reading… “Ray Kurzweil’s three technologies that will define our future”
A few months ago The Washington Post reported that Facebook collects 98 data points on each of its nearly 2 billion users. Among this 98 are ethnicity, income, net worth, home value, if you are a mother, if you are a soccer mom, if you are married, the number of lines of credit you have, if you are interested in Ramadan, when you bought your car, and on and on and on.
As our desktop computers, laptops, mobile devices, etc. stand idly by for a huge portion of the day, the need for computing resources is growing at a fast pace. Large IoT ecosystems, machine learning and deep learning algorithms and other sophisticated solutions being deployed in every domain and industry are raising the demand for stronger cloud servers and more bandwidth to address the minute needs of enterprises and businesses.
Continue reading… “Blockchain can create the world’s biggest supercomputer”
Scientists at the Pharmaceutical Artificial Intelligence (pharma.AI) group of Insilico Medicine, Inc, today announced the publication of a seminal paper demonstrating the application of generative adversarial autoencoders (AAEs) to generating new molecular fingerprints on demand.