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Despite what the media tends to depict, artificial intelligence is being put to better use than winning video games and board games. In fact, two of the world’s leading tech giants have begun using AI to help the blind perceive the world in helpful new ways.

Last week, Goldman Sachs led a $30 million investment round into Persado, a company that offers AI-based copywriting and marketing services. Persado claims its system "outperforms man-made messages 100% of the time” in a process they call "persuasion automation." In other words, according to Persado's promotional video below, human marketers hardly stand a chance.
Persado’s unique selling point is its ability to create and test the strength of words, phrases, and entire sentences used in marketing content. The company claims to have tagged, scored, and categorized some 1 million of these terms to determine their effectiveness in marketing copy.
Backed by this database, Persado says its software can “effectively parse hundreds of thousands of ways to convey emotions” and apply those expressions to augment marketing campaigns. Thus, the software can alternate copy between feelings of safety, intimacy, and anxiety, depending on a client’s needs. (See below for their "Wheel of Emotions" infographic). This automated system enables the company to generate and test more texts than human-managed marketing departments, which tend to rely on individually created A/B test samples. For international clients, Persado boasts that its software can translate texts into 23 languages.

[This interview has been revised and updated.]

Episode Summary: How do neural networks affect your life? There’s the one that you walk around with in your head of course, but the one in your pocket is an almost constant presence as well. In this episode, we speak with Dr. Yoshua Bengio about how the neural nets in computer software have become more ubiquitous and powerful, with deep learning algorithms and neural nets permeating research and commercial applications over the past decade. He also discusses likely future opportunities for deep learning in areas such as natural language processing and individualized medicine. Bengio was a researcher at Bell Labs with Yann LeCun, now at Facebook, and was working on neural nets before they were the "cool" new AI technology as it's often perceived today.

1 - A $2 Billion Chip to Accelerate Artificial Intelligence

San Jose-based Nvidia announced a new chip, designed especially for deep learning, during a company event this past Tuesday. The TeslaP100 could allow researchers to feed more data through artificial neural networks, potentially leading to more breakthroughs in the field. CEO Jen-Hsun Huang stated,

Science Magazine’s report on Friday that an artificial intelligence system was caught stealing banking customers’ money may have made you rethink vesting your funds in the burgeoning technology. But have no fear – the article was an April Fool’s joke.

Episode Summary: Statements about AI and risk, like those given by Elon Musk and Bill Gates, aren’t new, but they still resound with serious potential threats to the entirety of the human race. Some AI researchers have since come forward to challenge the substantive reality of these claims. In this episode, I interview a self-proclaimed “old timer” in the field of AI who tells us we might be too preemptive about our concerns of AI that will threaten our existence; instead, he suggests that our attention might be better  honed in thinking about how humans and AI can work together in the present and near future.

Picture this: Mad Men returns for a final season set in the near future. The advertising agency Sterling, Cooper, Draper, Pryce is still a powerhouse though its namesakes have since retired. Actually, the entire human staff has been reduced to just a few account men, managers, and technicians. Where are the creatives? They're in the computers.

Artificial intelligences are becoming better storytellers by the day. Last week, a novella written by an AI program nearly won a Japanese literary contest. “The Day a Computer Writes a Novel” (Konypyuta ga shosetsu wo kaku hi) is a surprisingly human tale of an AI that recognizes its writing skills and abandons its programmed task of aiding humanity in order to satisfy an artistic urge. The Japanese News reports (in an article that appears to be taken down at the time of this article update, September 2017) that this meta-novella and 10 other AI-authored submissions faced competition from over 1,400 man-penned manuscripts for the Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award.

Episode Summary: Emerj has had a number of past guests who have talked about neural networks and machine learning, but Dr. Pieter Mosterman speaks in-depth about the pendulum swing in this approach to AI from the 1960s to today. What we call neural networks as a general approach to developing AI has come in and out of favor two or three times in the last 50+ years. In this episode, Dr. Pieter Mosterman speaks about the shift in this approach and why neural networks have gone in and out of favor, as well as where the pendulum may take us in the not-too-distant future.

If the story of Cyc were written by Aesop, it would probably read something like The Tortoise and the Hare. The 30-year-old artificial intelligence engine's slow, steady, and idiosyncratic development is set to challenge recent pattern recognition methods that have seen AI algorithms conquer centuries-old board games and rush-hour traffic. Where the latter found success creating statistical models by processing troves of data on its own, Cyc’s professed skill will come from hardcoded rules and logic that allow it to understand how and why data points are related.
 
Cyc is a common sense engine, which over the past three decades has been fed thousands and thousands of encyclopedic facts. Since computers lack human-level inference, Cyc’s creators also fed it background knowledge – facts that we’d consider self-evident – to help connect the dots between what, how, and why things happened.
So, if Cyc is told that in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue, the system is also informed that Columbus sailed on the Mayflower, the Mayflower is a ship, a ship is a boat, and boats float. This degree of specificity is designed to make Cyc a comprehensive and unique resource with real-world applicable knowledge; it also helps explain why the knowledge base took so long to develop.