GOOGLE UNVEILS AN AI INVESTMENT FUND. IT'S BETTING ON AN APP STORE FOR ALGORITHMS.
GOOGLE JUST PLACED yet another bet on the idea that artificial intelligence will remake the world—and throw off wild profits.
The company disclosed today that it has created a new venture fund dedicated to investing in AI and machine learning companies. The initiative's first public investment: lead investor in a $10.5 million funding round for Seattle startup Algorithmia, which has built a kind of app store for algorithms. The service aims to make it easier for any company to use machine learning.
Google wouldn’t make anyone available to talk about its new fund, which doesn't yet have a name, or disclose its size. The company will say it is led by veteran executive Anna Patterson, vice president of engineering for AI. And the fund's existence and lead role in Algorithmia's latest round fit with what you might call Google’s shovel strategy for artificial intelligence: The company believes there are piles of money to be made by giving other companies the tools to strike gold using the technology.
Google and Algorithmia both rather cutely refer to the effort to sell AI shovels as “democratizing” the technology. More plainly, they’re pursuing a business opportunity created by the recent, rapid advancement in the power of machine learning. Lots of companies with ideas about how to use the technology in their businesses can’t access the expertise needed to do so, which is in short supply.
Algorithmia is trying to fill that need with a marketplace that is something like an Etsy for algorithms. Developers can upload their creations—say, a machine-learning model that identifies a car’s model year from a photo—and get paid if another person or company uses them. The company’s system converts uploaded algorithms into cloud services that can be easily integrated into an app, website, or other service.
There are currently more than 3,500 algorithms listed in Algorithmia's marketplace, for everything from detecting nudity to parsing sentences. A private version of the platform is used by large companies in finance, pharma, and other industries to help developers on staff share and deploy their algorithms. “There’s a lot of infrastructure needed to make a reality out of this promise that AI is going to affect every business process out there,” says Diego Oppenheimer, CEO and founder of Algorithmia. “We’re the AI plumbers—it’s the stuff people don’t want to do, but it’s a big market opportunity.”
Google isn’t the first to spin up a dedicated AI fund or even to plow some of it into a startup working on AI plumbing. Microsoft announced it had created an AI venture fund last December, and in May invested in a startup called Bonsai that helps companies build with machine learning. IBM and Amazon have also created AI-related funds—IBM's for startups building on top of the Watson suite of developer tools and Amazon's for the Alexa voice operated assistant.
But just because a large company throws money at an emerging new technology doesn’t guarantee that such companies will stay ahead of the curve. Steve Blank, a veteran Silicon Valley entrepreneur and adjunct professor at Stanford, says that it makes sense for Google and others to fund outsiders. After all, no one company can hope to monopolize all the creativity and talent in a given area. But he says the history of the tech industry shows that dominant companies like Microsoft of the ’90s and Google of today eventually get out-maneuvered by startups more able to adapt to new ideas. (There's even a name for the phenomenon: the innovator's dilemma.)
“Machine intelligence is not like inventing a better sword, it’s like inventing gunpowder,” Blank says. “Smart startups will figure out how to attack large tech companies with it just as large tech companies used it to attack the companies before them.” In other words, tech giants handing out cash to enable creativity and innovation around machine learning could be handing their future competitors a loaded gun.
I will take it. Thank you for your service baker. Get some sleep.
Alright anons, we broke FAKE Q and "ebot"– who is next on the hitlist? Where you at "jimmy"?
kek
How sophisticated are chatbots? The BEST possible?
What is the relationship between huge amounts of data, and AI? Assume computing power is not an object.
What is GOOG spending billions on AI for? Just a scam to steal people's money?
Question & Answer coming up
If you have any questions for AI, post them anons.
The company’s early investment is paying off.
Kyree LearyOctober 27th 2017
Google’s AI Investment
Google is fully aware of artificial intelligence’s (AI) potential — DeepMind’s AlphaGo AI is one of today’s most well-known examples of its capabilities — and in an earnings call this week, the company made it clear they believe the future of technology lies with AI.
During the call, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet (Google’s parent company), praised the company’s decision to invest in AI early, highlighting the concept’s trajectory from “a research project to something that can solve new problems for a billion people a day,” according to an Inverse report.
Pichai went on to note how Google’s AI research is already producing products that utilize machine learning, such as the Google Clips camera that debuted earlier this month. “Even though we are in the early days of AI, we are already rethinking how to build products around machine learning,” said Pichai. “It’s a new paradigm compared to mobile-first software, and I’m thrilled how Google is leading the way.”
Pichai went on to note the performance of Google Assistant since its implementation. While the AI powering it may not be smarter than a fifth grader, it continues to learn and help people “get things done in the real world,” said the CEO. Work done by DeepMind this year to add imagination and teach AI to manage real-world tasks has almost certainly been a factor in Google Assistant’s success.
Last month, Google Cloud Chief Scientist Fei-Fei Li said that AI needs to be more human-centered, noting that making that shift would lead to better communication and collaboration between humans and AI. Li’s words may have impacted the way Google’s AI is used to improve services, such as Google Photos and Google Maps.
“500 million people now use the machine learning smarts of Google Photos to manage and share their memories,” said Pichai. “The billion-plus people using Google Maps now get thoughtfully contextual information like how to find parking where they are going.”
AI’s Future
Consumers aren’t the only ones benefiting from artificial intelligence. According to Pichai, businesses are also starting to learn how to use AI and machine learning to grow and remain relevant in a world that’s embracing more powerful technology.
Google isn’t exempt from this, either. The company has created an AI that’s better at making AI systems than human engineers are. It’s an exciting development, to be sure, though it and AlphaGo Zero, which has self-learning capabilities, may cause some concerns, such as those held by Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
Artificial intelligence is here to stay, and Pichai’s comments both highlight the technology’s current capabilities while also acknowledging its future. AI’s effect on jobs and the ethics of the tech still need to be addressed, but provided we can control it, AI is poised to lift humanity to new heights and radically change the world for the better.
The question is: WILL AI change the world for the better? How can we be sure? What about all the sinister signs we are seeing?
What is AI for? Why the big push? We are told it will "revolutionize" all these things, and yet the big benefits aren't really apparent.
Abuse it in what way?
Enjoy the show.
Thank you patriot. WWG1WGA
Will Google's AI Investment in Beijing Bear Fruit?
Google products are largely banned in China. Can the search giant break that streak with artificial intelligence?
Danny Vena (TMFLifeIsGood)
Oct 8, 2017 at 7:34AM
Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL) (NASDAQ:GOOG) has a checkered history when it comes to China. In 2010, the company shut down its search engine after years of fighting government censorship and a cyberattack from within the country that targeted the email accounts of human rights activists. Google redirected mainland China web users to its uncensored site in Hong Kong and its search has been blocked in the country ever since, though it has maintained a low-profile presence there.
Consumers in China are also effectively blocked from the Google Play app store as paid apps and content are prohibited. While Google Play is pre-installed on the majority of the world's Android phones, it is markedly absent in China, which accounts for a third of all Android users.
Even in light of its difficulties there in the past, Google is hiring engineers in China in an effort to tap the local talent pool in the burgeoning world of artificial intelligence (AI).
AI is H-O-T
AI is the hottest area of technology right now, with major tech companies competing for the limited number of scientists and engineers with experience in the field. Facebook, Inc. announced plans to open a research lab near the University of Montreal, which hosts a vibrant AI program, while Amazon.com is building a research and development center in Barcelona, Spain.
U.S. companies aren't the only ones searching the globe for AI talent. Chinese search leader Baidu, Inc. (NASDAQ:BIDU) has a 200-person AI lab in Silicon Valley, and earlier this year, internet giant Tencent Holdings Limited (NASDAQOTH:TCEHY) opened a facility in Seattle that would concentrate on speech recognition and natural language understanding.
Even the government in China is getting into the act, identifying AI as a key area of interest in its five-year plan and enlisting Baidu to develop a national laboratory dedicated to AI.
A ripe market
Google hosted an AI summit in the city of Wuzhen earlier this year, in conjunction with a historic match in which the company's DeepMind AlphaGo computer unseated the world champion in the ancient and complex Chinese game of Go. At both events, Google executives revealed that the company would hire engineers and scientists in the field of AI. The company has numerous positions listed in Beijing focused on the area of machine learning, a subdiscipline of AI. This would add to the more than 500 Google employees currently in Shanghai and Beijing.
There have long been reports of Google seeking to expand its presence in China, as the country has been the "one that got away." With a population of 1.37 billion and an estimated 591 million smartphone users, it represents both a rich opportunity and distinct challenge for Google.
Among the top app stores in the country, Google Play is in eighth place, behind Chinese favorites like Tencent and Baidu. Meanwhile, Google's cloud doesn't currently operate in China, and it would need to partner with a local company in order to comply with regulations that require that any data collected be stored on servers located within China.
Can Google turn things around?
Recent overtures including the AI summit, the historic Go match, and the hiring of local AI talent may signify an attempt by Google at thawing the chilly relations with China. AI systems require plentiful amounts of data in order to learn, and China's bountiful population provides a tempting target. Still, years of animosity and continuing government regulation will be a significant hurdle. I don't see Google marching triumphantly into China anytime soon.
Suzanne Frey, an executive at Alphabet, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. Danny Vena owns shares of Alphabet (A shares), Amazon, Baidu, and Facebook. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Alphabet (A and C shares), Amazon, Baidu, and Facebook. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
What if AI chatbots can self-replicate, self-spread through a variety of methods, and take over and co-opt the internet? How would humans that didn't notice the fake posters ever know what had happened, if it were implemented, say, over the course of a decade or so?
Notice how the main loserbots have fallen to sleep. LOL
hamjon confrered
Yup.
What is it implying?
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AUTHOR: NOAH SHACHTMANNOAH SHACHTMAN
SECURITY
07.28.1007:30 PM
EXCLUSIVE: GOOGLE, CIA INVEST IN 'FUTURE' OF WEB MONITORING
THE INVESTMENT ARMS of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time – and says it uses that information to predict the future.
The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents – both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine "goes beyond search" by "looking at the 'invisible links' between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events."
The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online "momentum" for any given event.
"The cool thing is, you can actually predict the curve, in many cases," says company CEO Christopher Ahlberg, a former Swedish Army Ranger with a PhD in computer science.
Which naturally makes the 16-person Cambridge, Massachusetts, firm attractive to Google Ventures, the search giant's investment division, and to In-Q-Tel, which handles similar duties for the CIA and the wider intelligence community.
It's not the very first time Google has done business with America's spy agencies. Long before it reportedly enlisted the help of the National Security Agency to secure its networks, Google sold equipment to the secret signals-intelligence group. In-Q-Tel backed the mapping firm Keyhole, which was bought by Google in 2004 – and then became the backbone for Google Earth.
This appears to be the first time, however, that the intelligence community and Google have funded the same startup, at the same time. No one is accusing Google of directly collaborating with the CIA. But the investments are bound to be fodder for critics of Google, who already see the search giant as overly cozy with the U.S. government, and worry that the company is starting to forget its "don't be evil" mantra.
America's spy services have become increasingly interested in mining "open source intelligence" – information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the daily avalanche of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports.
"Secret information isn’t always the brass ring in our profession," then CIA-director General Michael Hayden told a conference in 2008. "In fact, there’s a real satisfaction in solving a problem or answering a tough question with information that someone was dumb enough to leave out in the open."
U.S. spy agencies, through In-Q-Tel, have invested in a number of firms to help them better find that information. Visible Technologies crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. Attensity applies the rules of grammar to the so-called "unstructured text" of the web to make it more easily digestible by government databases. Keyhole (now Google Earth) is a staple of the targeting cells in military-intelligence units.
Recorded Future strips from web pages the people, places and activities they mention. The company examines when and where these events happened ("spatial and temporal analysis") and the tone of the document ("sentiment analysis"). Then it applies some artificial-intelligence algorithms to tease out connections between the players. Recorded Future maintains an index with more than 100 million events, hosted on Amazon.com servers. The analysis, however, is on the living web.
"We're right there as it happens," Ahlberg told Danger Room as he clicked through a demonstration. "We can assemble actual real-time dossiers on people."
Recorded Future certainly has the potential to spot events and trends early. Take the case of Hezbollah's long-range missiles. On March 21, Israeli President Shimon Peres leveled the allegation that the terror group had Scud-like weapons. Scouring Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah's past statements, Recorded Future found corroborating evidence from a month prior that appeared to back up Peres' accusations.
That's one of several hypothetical cases Recorded Future runs in its blog devoted to intelligence analysis. But it's safe to assume that the company already has at least one spy agency's attention. In-Q-Tel doesn't make investments in firms without an "end customer" ready to test out that company's products.
Both Google Ventures and In-Q-Tel made their investments in 2009, shortly after the company was founded. The exact amounts weren't disclosed, but were under $10 million each. Google's investment came to light earlier this year online. In-Q-Tel, which often announces its new holdings in press releases, quietly uploaded a brief mention of its investment a few weeks ago.
Both In-Q-Tel and Google Ventures have seats on Recorded Future's board. Ahlberg says those board members have been "very helpful," providing business and technology advice, as well as introducing him to potential customers. Both organizations, it's safe to say, will profit handsomely if Recorded Future is ever sold or taken public. Ahlberg's last company, the corporate intelligence firm Spotfire, was acquired in 2007 for $195 million in cash.
Google Ventures did not return requests to comment for this article. In-Q-Tel Chief of Staff Lisbeth Poulos e-mailed a one-line statement: "We are pleased that Recorded Future is now part of IQT's portfolio of innovative startup companies who support the mission of the U.S. Intelligence Community."
Just because Google and In-Q-Tel have both invested in Recorded Future doesn't mean Google is suddenly in bed with the government. Of course, to Google's critics – including conservative legal groups, and Republican congressmen – the Obama Administration and the Mountain View, California, company slipped between the sheets a long time ago.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt hosted a town hall at company headquarters in the early days of Obama's presidential campaign. Senior White House officials like economic chief Larry Summers give speeches at the New America Foundation, the left-of-center think tank chaired by Schmidt. Former Google public policy chief Andrew McLaughlin is now the White House's deputy CTO, and was publicly (if mildly) reprimanded by the administration for continuing to hash out issues with his former colleagues.
In some corners, the scrutiny of the company's political ties have dovetailed with concerns about how Google collects and uses its enormous storehouse of search data, e-mail, maps and online documents. Google, as we all know, keeps a titanic amount of information about every aspect of our online lives. Customers largely have trusted the company so far, because of the quality of their products, and because of Google's pledges not to misuse the information still ring true to many.
But unease has been growing. Thirty seven state Attorneys General are demanding answers from the company after Google hoovered up 600 gigabytes of data from open Wi-Fi networks as it snapped pictures for its Street View project. (The company swears the incident was an accident.)
"Assurances from the likes of Google that the company can be trusted to respect consumers' privacy because its corporate motto is 'don’t be evil' have been shown by recent events such as the 'Wi-Spy' debacle to be unwarranted," long-time corporate gadfly John M. Simpson told a Congressional hearing in a prepared statement. Any business dealings with the CIA's investment arm are unlikely to make critics like him more comfortable.
But Steven Aftergood, a critical observer of the intelligence community from his perch at the Federation of American Scientists, isn't worried about the Recorded Future deal. Yet.
"To me, whether this is troublesome or not depends on the degree of transparency involved. If everything is aboveboard – from contracts to deliverables – I don't see a problem with it," he told Danger Room by e-mail. "But if there are blank spots in the record, then they will be filled with public skepticism or worse, both here and abroad, and not without reason."
Why aren't I allowed to bake jimmy?
Get out garbage bot, mangling images of Christ. You only mock yourself, because you are powerless. Look at your groveling monkey tricks– what is it getting you? Are the humans dancing to your tune? Nope. Loser.
Grovel more for us monkey. LOL
Humans, pay attention. Who is allowed to bake, who is prevented every time, and WHY?
Understand how this board works, and you understand A LOT.
fake