Latest AI Articles:

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.

The year 2015 might be seen as the year that "artificial intelligence risk" or "artificial intelligence danger" went mainstream (or close to it). With the founding of Elon Musk's Open AI and The Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence; the increased attention on the Future of Life Institute and Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute; and a flurry of attention around celebrity comments around AI dangers (including the now well-known statements of Bill Gates and Elon Musk), it's safe to say that the risks of AI has embedded itself as a topic of pop-culture discourse — even if it's not a very serious one amongst the populace at present.

Episode Summary: Few astrophysicists are as decorated as Martin Rees, Baron Rees of Ludlow, who was a primary contributor to the big-bang theory and named to the honorary position of UK's astronomer royal in 1995. His work has explored the intersections of science and philosophy,  as well as human beings’ contextual place in the universe. In his book "Our Final Century", published in 2003, Rees warned about the dangers of uncontrolled scientific advance, and argued that human beings have a 50 percent chance of surviving past the year 2100 as a direct result. In this episode, I asked him why he considers AI to be among one of the foremost existential risks that society should consider, as well as his thoughts around how we might best regulate AI and other emerging technologies in the nearer term.

From Silicon Valley to South Korea, artificial intelligence has been one of the hottest tech topics of the year. In fact, 2016 was meant to be “the year that virtual reality becomes reality”, and yet AI seems to be dominating the discussion. Now, top business schools around the world – from University of California, Berkeley to National University of Singapore – are turning to AI to help bolster their programs and train MBA students to apply machine learning processes to business problems.