Google just gave its AI its own “human” psychologist
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Many AI’s are black boxes, and as we plug them into the world’s digital fabrics not knowing how they think, or make decisions, or how “rational” they are is a problem, so companies are trying to design new ways to test it. Artificial Intelligence (AI)...
Google’s AI can rate photos on aesthetic appeal
WHY THIS MATTER IN BRIEF Google’s AI is moving from just being able to identify and categorise images to being able to identify them according to their aesthetics, and that’s big. Today’s slew of photo apps can help you find objects in your pictures but they don’t tell you...
Baidu’s AI can clone anyone’s voice in under a minute
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Being able to clone people’s voices, and mimic them, opens up a range of well meaning opportunities, but it also paves the way for fake news chaos and everything in between… In the near future, just as it is today, fake news will become...
Researchers use mind-reading AI to put people’s thoughts on TV
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Being able to read people’s minds, and visualise what they’re thinking and their memories on a screen will revolutionise almost every part of society, and that’s before we start talking about telepathy and futuristic brain downloading. It already seems a little like computers can...
America’s most powerful supercomputer is building superior AI’s
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF It normally takes human data scientists and the best AI’s weeks to build neural network software, but ORNL’s Titan supercomputer is building them in a day, and the AI’s it’s producing are far superior to anything humans can create. Last year, in a world...
Futurist keynote, Vienna: The Future of FMCG and Innovation, Henkel Innovation Summit
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF In the next decade the world of FMCG will be irrevocably altered by the new technologies and autonomous retailers who design, manufacture and deliver goods autonomously, at speed, and on demand. This Monday I was supposed to be delivering a keynote in Vienna, Austria,...
MIT researchers read a neural networks mind to boost its performance
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Neural networks are incredibly powerful and increasingly capable but they’re a black box, now a team from MIT has figured out a way to read their minds. Neural networks, which learn to perform computational tasks by analysing huge sets of training data, have been...
DeepMind’s self-learning AI took four hours to learn and master chess
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Generalised AI’s that can learn and master complex subjects within hours will have wide ranging benefits for industry and society alike. As most people will happily tell you Chess isn’t an easy game, at least by human standards, but for an Artificial Intelligence (AI)...
Google’s AI is helping scientists unravel the mysteries of the human genome
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF With the advent of personalised medicine and new revolutionary gene treatments, being able to interpret and make sense of the vast volumes of human genomic data in order to better predict disease indicators and outcomes, and provide patients with better treatments, will become increasingly crucial....
DeepMind unveils the world’s first test to assess dangerous AI’s and algorithms
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF AI is being strapped into everything from self-driving cars and autonomous weapons systems and until now we had no way to assess how dangerous, or how much of a threat, those AI’s could become. Earlier this year a group of world experts convened to...
IBM’s AI learns how to predict the outcomes of chemical reactions
WHY THIS MATTERS BRIEF Chemistry is the basis and foundation of everything on Earth and being able to predict the outcomes of new chemical reactions will help industries create new compounds and new materials faster than ever before. By thinking of atoms as letters and molecules as words an...
DeepMind’s newest AI learns by itself and creates its own knowledge
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF An AI that can learn by itself, with no human interaction, and that can “create its own knowledge” could give us a new perspective on issues affecting the world, and transform industry, innovation and society. A couple of month’s ago Google’s Artificial Intelligence (AI)...
MIT’s new AI is helping scientists design new, futuristic materials
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Materials are a fundamental building block of everything in existence today, whether it’s cells, our power plants or our smartphones and devices, now researchers have built an AI to help them automate the discovery of new materials and it could revolutionise everything. Over the...
Researchers have developed an AI that can identify masked individuals
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Technology is increasingly helping governments and multi-nationals strip away our anonymity and privacy, and the pros and cons depend on which side of the fence you sit, but one thing is certain, in the future there will be no such thing as privacy – online...
Researchers have found a way to successfully debug neural networks
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF A bug in your self-driving car’s AI software caused it to drive you off a cliff and you’re dead, you’re probably now wishing that it’d been debugged – and now it can be. If you listen to the venture capitalists in Silicon Valley then...
Nvidia’s newest AI is creating scarily realistic photos of fake celebrities
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Artificial Intelligence is getting more creative and better at creating realistic images and photos that fool even the most cynical experts, and it will bring about a new era in content creation. One of the more unexpected outcomes of today’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) revolution...
Tech giants team up to create the world’s first Deep Learning standard
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Many of today’s technology companies are creating proprietary AI’s that can’t interoperate with each other but a new framework from Facebook and Microsoft is setting out to change that. As Artificial Intelligence (AI), and in this case more specifically Machine Learning becomes more pervasive...
Microsoft unveils it’s new real time AI engine
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF AI’s that can analyse data in real time will become increasingly important as we come to rely on them more and more to help us make, and automate, decisions It’s probably fair to say that in many cases, whether it’s the new breed of...
The sixth Game of Thrones book is being written by an AI
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Learning how to write novels is difficult enough for a human, but now some AI’s are trying tackle the task. Alas for all of those among you who love fire breathing Dragons, that aren’t the Mother-in-Law kind, and weird zombie ice creatures, the seventh...
AI is helping create realistic “Fake news!” videos and it’s going to be a problem
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF The ability of “unethical actors” to create realistic looking video and audio of famous people to generate “Fake news!” is accelerating exponentially and politicians are already way behind the curve. Over the past couple of years, even before “Fake news!” became the monster topic...
