Your next smartphone could have sonar
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF With biometrics becoming an increasingly important way of authenticating people some of todays technologies still leave much to be desired, as a result teams around the world are continually looking to push the boundaries. VoiceGesture is an app that could make phones far more...
Google’s Lunar XPrize will continue, without Google
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Sometimes the prize isn’t the prize, it’s just a bonus, and in this case most of the teams who were involved in the original Google Lunar XPrize still have their sights set on a Moon landing in 2019. The Google Lunar XPRIZE, a $30...
World first as Waymo’s self-driving taxi service opens to the public
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Many people think the future takes a long time to arrive, when in matter of fact it’s arriving faster than it ever has in the past, and now that Waymo’s service is live others will quickly follow. Self-driving taxis, the type that stay on...
Google are testing a 72 Qubit quantum computing chip
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Quantum computing companies are in a race to reach a major performance milestone called Quantum Supremacy, and Google looks like they might beat the rest of the world to the post. A few months after Intel revealed their first 17 Qubit quantum chip, IBM...
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...
Google’s revolutionary new “Codeless AI” lets non programmers build their own AI’s
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF AI will help revolutionise every corner of society and Google is helping democratise the technology so everyone, with any capability, programmers and non programmers, can build models and make use of it. With the dramatic rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in recent years it’s...
$30m Google Lunar XPrize moonshot competition ends without a winner
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF The Google Lunar XPrize was ambitious moonshot, but, like any competition time was against the teams from the start. After 10 long years, the Google sponsored competition, the Google Lunar XPrize, which aimed to land a robot on the moon for millions of dollars of prize money...
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...
Google’s AI just created its own child AI and it beat human experts
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF AI’s that can create new child AI’s, let alone ones that are better than anything humans are capable of creating, will revolutionise industry and society. In a move that will both amaze and terrify people, probably at the same time, this week Google announced...
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)...
The future according to Google search results
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Lots of people want to know what the future holds and Google, it has to be said, is most people’s go to reference, so is Google good at predicting the future? Well, check it out for yourself. Have you ever wondered what the future...
Google goes all in on building AI’s that build new AI’s
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF The majority of companies today see AI as the future, but there is a shortage of individuals and skills in the market to meet demand, as a result companies are now developing AI’s that design and build new AI’s for them. In recent months...
Google says Quantum Supremacy is just months away
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF There will come a time when quantum computers will outperform even the fastest “classical” computers, and now that time could be just a few months away. The great promise of quantum computing is its ability to perform calculations of astonishing complexity that are far...
Amazon and Google “set to disrupt the loans industry”
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF The borders between previously distinct industries are eroding and blurring, and now companies would be wise to re-evaluate the competitive landscape before they find themselves on the wrong end of disruption. It used to be that a tech company was a tech company and...
Brace yourselves AI is about to make the “Fake News!” problem a whole lot worse
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF We are approaching a dangerous threshold where one day, in the next few years, you won’t be able to trust what you see, or easily distinguish fake news from real news, and it could have big consequences on democracy and society. Over the past...
Google’s new AI can build AI’s that eclipse those created by human experts
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF It is inevitable that one day the majority, if not all, new AI’s will be created by AI’s and not humans, and that day might come sooner than we think. Machine learning experts and data scientists are in increasingly short supply as organisations around...
Google’s new AI learns nearly as fast as humans
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Artificial intelligence can only progress as fast as it can learn, and now that it can learn at almost human speed it’s going to be progressing much, much faster. Make no mistake, artificial intelligence (AI) has humans in its perfect, heightened, machine vision sights. Deep...
New breakthrough gives AI a human memory
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Unknown to many AI’s are amnesiacs, they forget almost everything they’re taught, but now a new human like memory system could be about to take AI to the next level and make them much, much smarter. When researchers decide to train their latest and greatest...