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  • Big Tech Won’t Build Products That Are Part of the Kill Chain, Says Anduril Founder

    Big Tech Won’t Build Products That Are Part of the Kill Chain, Says Anduril Founder

    “I don’t think that Microsoft, Amazon, or any of these big tech companies are going to go all-in and say we are going to build products that are going to be controversial, part of the kill chain, and designed specifically for DoD,” says the founder of Oculus VR and Anduril, Palmer Luckey. “Because if it reduces their consumer enterprise sales by one percent or increases controversy by one percent it’s likely not worth doing.”

    Luckey added, “I don’t think that the United States leads in the technologies that are going to be relevant to the warfare of the future. I think that the US is falling behind in areas like autonomy and artificial intelligence.”

    Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus VR and Anduril, discusses how Anduril can compete and win against behemoth defense contractors and big tech in an interview on CNBC:

    Big Tech Won’t Build Products That Are Part of the Kill Chain

    No, (I don’t think Microsoft is a rival to Anduril). Actually, I think that we’re going to be doing a lot of work with Microsoft on a lot of this stuff. You’re not going to have one company owning everything anyway. I’m glad that Microsoft and Amazon are vigorously competing for this Jedi contract. Contrast that with Google that dropped out because they said they couldn’t be sure the government was going to abide to their internal corporate ethics principles. I think that there’s a big difference though between what Amazon and Microsoft are doing with Jedi and what we’re doing. Microsoft has said that the military will always have access to their best technology and that’s true. But they also are selling to everyone. They’re building a product that’s for everyone.

    Everything that we’re building is specifically for the Department of Defense. We’re not going out there and saying, let’s resell the thing where we make 90 percent of our money in the consumer or the enterprise space. We’re going to say what do they need and what is the absolute perfect thing? I don’t think that Microsoft, Amazon, or any of these big tech companies are going to go all-in and say we are going to build products that are going to be controversial, part of the kill chain, and designed specifically for DoD. Because if it reduces their consumer enterprise sales by one percent or increases controversy by one percent it’s likely not worth doing.

    US Is Falling Behind In Autonomy and Artificial Intelligence

    In China, you have lots of new companies doing defense work and lots of consumer technology companies doing really strong defense. China has a very strong pipeline from new tech to military deployment. I think the United States knows that they can learn a little bit from that and that they’re going to have to if they’re going to keep up with our adversaries who are honestly much better at that innovation pipeline than we are right now.

    I think that we lead right now especially when it comes to conventional military force and when it comes to conventional military operations. I don’t think that the United States leads in the technologies that are going to be relevant to the warfare of the future. I think that the US is falling behind in areas like autonomy and artificial intelligence. I think that China has structural advantages over the United States because they’re willing to surveil their entire population and use it as a training system for their artificial intelligence models. I’m not saying that we should do that. I’m very much against that in fact. But we do have to realize that China has certain structural advantages.

    In China, the government by law is able to take any technology they want from the private sector and use it for military purposes. In the United States, we’re lucky that our companies are even able to say I don’t want to work with the government. I don’t agree with Google’s decision to pull out of the Jedi contract, for example, but I am very supportive of their right to do so. Again, I’m not saying we need to be more like China on this. I think that would be terrible. But we do have to recognize that there are structural advantages in what they’re doing and so we have to not just do the same thing they’re doing. We have to try new things, better things, and alternate routes where they don’t really have such a strong advantage.

    Lockheed, Raytheon Do Not Have The Best New Tech Talent

    I think our (smaller) size actually works in our favor. If it was a big landscape of smaller highly competitive players I think we actually would have a harder time raising money. As it is investors look and they say, hey, the whole field is dominated by a handful of players that make all of the money. They’re old, they’re very slow-moving, they don’t have all the best talent. That type of market is the one where you can believe the most that somebody can come in and disrupt it.

    We’re a defense technology company first. We’re not a consumer technology company dabbling in defense work. We from day one said what can we develop that really helps the US Department of Defense and that helps keep America and our allies safe. That’s why we’re building artificial intelligence powered hardware and software. I think that we have a few big competitive advantages. The first thing is that we have a really strong team that comes from areas where the experts in autonomy, computer vision, machine learning, networking, those types of things, actually are. 

    Lockheed, Raytheon, the traditional defense primes, they’re good at building aircraft carriers and good at building fighter interceptors but they do not have the world’s best talent when it comes to artificial intelligence, computer vision, and machine learning. That’s why our company is focusing on that. We think we can add a lot of value there that other people cannot necessarily add.

    Big Tech Won’t Build Products That Are Part of the Kill Chain, Says Anduril Founder Palmer Luckey


  • John Carmack Stepping Down As Oculus CTO To Focus On AI Research

    John Carmack Stepping Down As Oculus CTO To Focus On AI Research

    John Carmack is a legend in the video game community, having co-founded id Software and taken the lead on ground-breaking games such as Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein 3D, Rage and others. More recently, he has held the role of CTO at Oculus VR.

    Now, in a Facebook post, Carmack has announced he is resigning his position to pursue AI research. He plans on being a “consulting CTO” for Oculus, but only in a modest role.

    “Starting this week, I’m moving to a ‘Consulting CTO’ position with Oculus.

    “I will still have a voice in the development work, but it will only be consuming a modest slice of my time.

    “As for what I am going to be doing with the rest of my time: When I think back over everything I have done across games, aerospace, and VR, I have always felt that I had at least a vague ‘line of sight’ to the solutions, even if they were unconventional or unproven. I have sometimes wondered how I would fare with a problem where the solution really isn’t in sight. I decided that I should give it a try before I get too old.

    “I’m going to work on artificial general intelligence (AGI).

    “I think it is possible, enormously valuable, and that I have a non-negligible chance of making a difference there, so by a Pascal’s Mugging sort of logic, I should be working on it.

    “For the time being at least, I am going to be going about it ‘Victorian Gentleman Scientist’ style, pursuing my inquiries from home, and drafting my son into the work.

    Runner up for next project was cost effective nuclear fission reactors, which wouldn’t have been as suitable for that style of work. 😊”

    If Carmack’s new focus has even a fraction of the success he’s enjoyed in the gaming industry, the AI field will likely reap significant benefits from his participation.

  • Intuit CEO Thinks AI Will Help Humans, Not Replace Them

    Intuit CEO Thinks AI Will Help Humans, Not Replace Them

    Business Insider is reporting that Intuit’s CEO has a very different view of AI in the workplace from many other executives.

    Many executives, business leaders and experts fear AI will result in countless lost jobs as machines replace human workers. Intuit’s CEO, Sasan Goodarzi, doesn’t share those concerns, instead believing that AI is simply another transition, such as occurred when the Internet became popular.

    Goodarzi told Business Insider: “AI is going to automate a lot of what is done today, a lot of predictions that you have to make. AI can automate all of that, but then it actually elevates where people can provide value, it elevates where they can provide judgement.

    “History is our best teacher. When the internet was coming around there was lots of concern that because of the internet, because of commerce, because of what you could now do that would be elimination of a lot of jobs and in fact it’s created a lot of jobs.”

    This outlook on AI’s role informs the company’s approach to the emerging technology, using it to maximize available resources, including the human element.

    “Machine learning at the end of the day takes input and it makes a recommendation, and if something has to rely on one hundred percent accuracy, machine learning probably wouldn’t be good for that,” Goodarzi told Business Insider. He maintains that AI is “only as good as the data that it has and it’s only as good as how it gets trained.”

    For individuals worried about losing their jobs to AI and automation, Goodarzi’s comments are a welcome change of pace from the traditional outlook of many in the industry.

  • Google Updates Its Search Algorithm: Brings Neural Network Techniques to Search

    Google Updates Its Search Algorithm: Brings Neural Network Techniques to Search

    Whenever Google updates, tweaks, replaces or improves its search algorithms, webmasters the world over anxiously wait to see how it will impact their rankings.

    Google’s latest update, Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), is one of the company’s most interesting to date. Last year Google “introduced and open-sourced a neural network-based technique for natural language processing (NLP) pre-training,” or BERT.

    The company is using BERT to better understand complex, natural language queries and return more relevant results.

    “By applying BERT models to both ranking and featured snippets in Search, we’re able to do a much better job helping you find useful information,” wrote Pandu Nayak, Google Fellow and Vice President, Search in a company blog post. “In fact, when it comes to ranking results, BERT will help Search better understand one in 10 searches in the U.S. in English, and we’ll bring this to more languages and locales over time.

    “Particularly for longer, more conversational queries, or searches where prepositions like ‘for’ and ‘to’ matter a lot to the meaning, Search will be able to understand the context of the words in your query. You can search in a way that feels natural for you.

    “To launch these improvements, we did a lot of testing to ensure that the changes actually are more helpful. Here are some of the examples that showed up our evaluation process that demonstrate BERT’s ability to understand the intent behind your search.

    “Here’s a search for ‘2019 brazil traveler to usa need a visa.’ The word ‘to’ and its relationship to the other words in the query are particularly important to understanding the meaning. It’s about a Brazilian traveling to the U.S., and not the other way around. Previously, our algorithms wouldn’t understand the importance of this connection, and we returned results about U.S. citizens traveling to Brazil. With BERT, Search is able to grasp this nuance and know that the very common word “to” actually matters a lot here, and we can provide a much more relevant result for this query.”

  • AlphaStar, Google’s AI, Makes Appearance at BlizzCon 2019

    AlphaStar, Google’s AI, Makes Appearance at BlizzCon 2019

    Google’s DeepMind AI has already made headlines for its abilities. Now, StarCraft players can go head-to-head with AlphaStar, a DeepMind-powered program, at Blizzcon 2019.

    StarCraft has long been considered one of the most advanced, well-rounded and complicated real-time-strategy (RTS) games on the market. The game enjoys a large following and a professional eSports presence. For players to succeed, they must be able to master complex strategies, scout their opponent, manage an economy, choose the right builds and maintain enough actions per minute (APM) to control everything happening.

    AlphaStar has achieved the rank of Grandmaster for all three of the races in StarCraft II, making it better than 99.8% of all human players. To ensure the AI plays on equal terms, its mouse clicks are restricted to the same level that a human player can achieve and the AI can only see the portion of the map it has explored—unlike many games where the computer can see everything.

    Google hopes the advances made with AlphaStar will have applications far beyond RTS.

    “At DeepMind, we’re interested in understanding the potential – and limitations – of open-ended learning, which enables us to develop robust and flexible agents that can cope with complex, real-world domains. Games like StarCraft are an excellent training ground to advance these approaches, as players must use limited information to make dynamic and difficult decisions that have ramifications on multiple levels and timescales.

    “Open-ended learning systems that utilise learning-based agents and self-play have achieved impressive results in increasingly challenging domains. Thanks to advances in imitation learning, reinforcement learning, and the League, we were able to train AlphaStar Final, an agent that reached Grandmaster level at the full game of StarCraft II without any modifications, as shown in the above video. This agent played online anonymously, using the gaming platform Battle.net, and achieved a Grandmaster level using all three StarCraft II races. AlphaStar played using a camera interface, with similar information to what human players would have, and with restrictions on its action rate to make it comparable with human players. The interface and restrictions were approved by a professional player. Ultimately, these results provide strong evidence that general-purpose learning techniques can scale AI systems to work in complex, dynamic environments involving multiple actors. The techniques we used to develop AlphaStar will help further the safety and robustness of AI systems in general, and, we hope, may serve to advance our research in real-world domains.”

  • SoundHound & Deutsche Telekom Form Partnership For Voice-Driven AI Devices

    SoundHound & Deutsche Telekom Form Partnership For Voice-Driven AI Devices

    SoundHound and Deutsche Telekom have announced a partnership between the two companies to help the latter integrate voices services.

    Deutsche Telekom is looking to differentiate itself in the telecom industry by using voice services to complement traditional, manual interfaces, and is determined to provide the best voice experience to its customers.

    SoundHound, long-known for its music recognition app, has become a leading provider of voice-driven AI solutions.

    “SoundHound Inc.’s Houndify Voice AI solutions are designed to help companies deliver better user experiences than manual interfaces — such as keyboards, remote devices and touch screens — while elevating brand images and creating greater connections with customers. As a global provider of customized voice AI solutions, SoundHound Inc. provides multilingual support through our Houndify platform. We currently support 14+ languages including English, German, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, and Portuguese — and we’re adding more all the time.

    “Houndify also gives manufacturers the flexibility to develop a custom wake word and custom domains with access to an extensive library of public domains for everything from weather, to navigation, to music. The platform also allows for the integration of multiple voice assistants to live side-by-side, each with its own wake word.

    “The partnership with Deutsche Telekom deepens SoundHound Inc.’s presence in the telecommunications industry. Recently, SoundHound Inc. partnered with Motorola to integrate the Houndify Voice AI platform into the company’s products, including moto g6, moto g6 plus, moto z3 plan, and moto z3. Houndify’s Voice AI platform brings speed and accuracy to users of Moto Voice when they make calls, send messages, and access information on weather, navigation, sports, and more.”

  • Microsoft Announces HAMS: Harnessing AutoMobiles for Safety

    Microsoft Announces HAMS: Harnessing AutoMobiles for Safety

    Microsoft is the latest tech company to take on driver safety with their announcement of the Harnessing AutoMobiles for Safety (HAMS) project.

    The HAMS project uses a sensing device to create a virtual “safety harness” for the vehicle. Microsoft’s goal is to monitor the state of the driver, as well as how the vehicle is being driven for the road and environment it’s being operated in.

    Microsoft is using smartphones as the sensing device, as the front and rear-mounted cameras, as well as the accelerometer, give HAMS the ability to monitor the road, driver, acceleration and deceleration.

    “The sensing device employed in HAMS is an off-the-shelf smartphone. The smartphone is mounted on the windshield, with its front camera facing the driver and the rear camera looking out to the front. The key to the operation of HAMS is the use of multiple sensors simultaneously. For example, when a sharp braking event is detected (using the smartphone’s accelerometer), the distance to the vehicle in front is checked (using the rear camera), along with indications of driver distraction or fatigue (using the front camera). Such sensing and detection in tandem helps provide a holistic and accurate picture of how the vehicle is being driven, enabling appropriate feedback to then be generated.

    “As part of the project, we have also explored several use cases for HAMS. One of the earliest we prototyped was a fleet management dashboard, which allowed a supervisor to view safety-related incidents of interest offline. We have also piloted HAMS in the context of driver training, in collaboration with the Institute of Driving and Traffic Research (IDTR), run by Maruti-Suzuki, the largest passenger car manufacturer in India.”

  • German Commission Recommends Tighter Regulation of AI Development

    German Commission Recommends Tighter Regulation of AI Development

    Few technologies have sparked as much debate, held more promise or terrified more people than artificial intelligence (AI). Depending on who is talking, AI promises to usher in a new technological era or precipitate the demise of humanity.

    Notable individuals such as Mark Zuckerberg, Ray Kurzweil and Sam Altman have been strong proponents of AI development, even going so far as to believe the potential benefits create a moral imperative to pursue AI research. Others, such as Elon Musk, Clive Sinclair and the late Stephen Hawking, believe true AI may represent the greatest existential danger to the human race.

    With so much controversy, governments are getting drug into the middle of the debate, trying to navigate what role they should play in regulating AI, with Germany the latest to wade in on the topic. In 2018, the German government formed the Data Ethics Commission to “develop ethical benchmarks and guidelines as well as specific recommendations for action, aiming at protecting the individual, preserving social cohesion, and safeguarding and promoting prosperity in the information age.”

    Last week the commission released an opinion on AI development, recommending more regulation and government involvement.

    “The Data Ethics Commission holds the view that regulation is necessary, and cannot be replaced by ethical principles. This is particularly true for issues with heightened implications for fundamental rights that require the central decisions to be made by the democratically elected legislator. Regulation is also an essential basis for building a system where citizens, companies and institutions can trust that the transformation of society will be guided by ethical principles.”

    AI proponents and tech experts are already speaking about against the commission’s findings, voicing concern that the focus on regulation will stifle innovation.

    “Europe wants to be more competitive in the digital economy,” wrote Eline Chivot, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Data Innovation in Brussels. “But it cannot substitute regulation for innovation. Rather than trying to achieve competitiveness in AI through policies designed to disadvantage foreign providers and promote European digital sovereignty, European policymakers should instead focus on developing an AI strategy that invests in people, data, and digital infrastructure, and creates a more innovation-friendly regulatory environment, so that European firms can better compete with China and the United States.”

    One thing is certain: The debate about AI, its future and the best way to safely develop the technology is far from over.

  • Blue Shield of California to Integrate Apple Watches in Doctor Visits

    Blue Shield of California to Integrate Apple Watches in Doctor Visits

    According to a report by Health Data Management, Blue Shield of California (BSC) is planning on using the Apple Watch to improve doctor’s visits.

    “BSC, together with its health services partner Altais, have partnered with Notable Health, a company that provides technology to captures office visits through the use of artificial intelligence.

    “The data is captured, then the tool adds lab results, prescriptions and referrals, and prepares everything for sign-off for addition to the EHR. In short, the doctor wears the watch, speaks naturally during the office visit, and the technology does the rest.”

    BCS and Altais hope to roll out the technology to BSC’s network of doctors first, then expand as it proves successful. The Paradise (Calif.) Medical Group will be the first to receive the new tech and is slated to start using it soon.

    Notable’s platform uses artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and natural language processing to pair down the audio it hears to the most relevant data necessary for EHR records. Even after the visit, the AI continues to organize the information to expedite claims.

    As Jeff Bailet, MD, president and CEO of Altais said: “Our goal is to help physicians seamlessly leverage technology to improve the health and well-being of their patients—all while reducing administrative hassles and enhancing their professional gratification. Notable Health will help us get there with its digital assistant technology that automates manual tasks across any electronic health record.”

    With a 2016 study showing that physicians only spend a total of 27 percent of their day interacting with patients, as opposed to 49.2 percent spent on EHR and desk work, this initiative could prove to be a boon to doctors everywhere.

  • Alteryx Acquires Feature Labs, An MIT-Born Machine Learning Startup

    Alteryx Acquires Feature Labs, An MIT-Born Machine Learning Startup

    Data science is one of the fastest growing segments of the tech industry, and Alteryx, Inc. is front and center in the data revolution. The Alteryx Platform provides a collaborative, governed platform to quickly and efficiently search, analyze and use pertinent data.

    To continue accelerating innovation, Alteryx announced it has purchased a startup with roots in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Feature Labs “automates feature engineering for machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) applications.”

    Combining the two companies’ platforms and engineering will result in faster time-to-insight and time-to-value for data scientists and analysts. Feature Labs’ algorithms are designed to “optimize the manual, time-consuming and error-prone process required to build machine learning models.”

    Feature Labs makes its open-source libraries available to data scientists around the world. In what is no doubt welcome news, Alteryx has already committed to continued support of the open-source community.

    From the Press Release:

    “Feature Labs’ vision to help both data scientists and business analysts easily gain insight and understand the factors driving their business matches the Alteryx DNA. Together, we are helping customers address the skills gap by putting more powerful advanced analytic capabilities directly into the hands of those responsible for making faster decisions and accelerating results. We are excited to welcome the Feature Labs team and to add an engineering hub in Boston,” said Dean Stoecker, co-founder and CEO of Alteryx.

    “Alteryx maintains its leadership in the market by continuing to evolve its best-in-class, code-free and code-friendly platform to anticipate and meet the demands of the 54 million data workers worldwide2. With the addition of our unique capabilities, we expect to empower more businesses to build machine learning algorithms faster and operationalize data science,” said Max Kanter, co-founder and CEO of Feature Labs. “Feature engineering is often a time-consuming and manual process and we help companies automate this process and deploy impactful machine learning models.”

  • Reddit Announces New Rules to Fight Bullying and Harassment

    Reddit Announces New Rules to Fight Bullying and Harassment

    Shortly after Twitter announced new measures to protect users from online abuse, Reddit has unveiled new rules designed to help moderators combat bullying and abuse on their platform.

    Reddit moderator landoflobsters, explained the new policy in a post to /r/announcements. In the post, landoflobsters detailed how the previous policy required bad behavior to be “continued” or “systematic” before moderators had authority to take action. Similarly, the threshold for someone who feared for their safety due to harassment was set too high, nor was it clear whether the same rules applied to individuals and groups. The end result was that Reddit quickly became a haven for trolls.

    With the site’s new rules, moderators will be able to act much faster to protect users. In particular, the new rules take a “big picture” approach to moderating.

    “The changes we’re making today are trying to better address that, as well as to give some meta-context about the spirit of this rule: chiefly, Reddit is a place for conversation,” said landoflobsters. “Thus, behavior whose core effect is to shut people out of that conversation through intimidation or abuse has no place on our platform.”

    Reddit will also accept reports of abuse from bystanders, rather than requiring the individual being harassed to report it. The goal is to reduce any additional burden on someone who may already be suffering distress.

    The announcement also goes on to explain that Reddit will be using more machine learning tools to sort and prioritize human reports. While humans will still make the decisions about whether behavior rises to the level requiring banning, machine learning will make it easier for human moderators to deal with the volume.

    Towards the end of the announcement, landoflobsters cautions that “as with any rule change, this will take some time to fully enforce. Our response times have improved significantly since the start of the year, but we’re always striving to move faster. In the meantime, we encourage moderators to take this opportunity to examine their community rules and make sure that they are not creating an environment where bullying or harassment are tolerated or encouraged.”

  • Amazon Looks to Preempt Facial Recognition Legislation

    Amazon Looks to Preempt Facial Recognition Legislation

    Few technologies are more controversial and divisive as facial recognition. Customers have come to rely on it to log into their phones and tablets, police and government agencies are increasingly using it to identify suspects and privacy advocates decry it as an unconstitutional invasion of people’s rights.

    Amazon has established itself as a leader in the field of facial recognition with its Rekognition software. While the software is widely used by police, as well as government agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), it has not escaped controversy. The ACLU has twice used Rekognition on photos of politicians, each time with dozens of false matches. In both instances, however, Amazon responded by pointing out that the ACLU left the confidence setting at the default 80 percent threshold, instead of the 99 percent threshold Amazon recommends for law enforcement.

    Nonetheless, Amazon can see the writing on the wall and knows it’s only a matter of time before facial recognition is regulated. Needless to say, it’s in Amazon’s best interests for those regulations to favor companies who profit off of the technology. To that end, Vox is reporting that Amazon is drafting laws to regulate facial recognition, which they plan on pitching to lawmakers.

    According to Vox, CEO Jeff Bezos told reporters that the company’s “public policy team is actually working on facial recognition regulations; it makes a lot of sense to regulate that.

    “It’s a perfect example of something that has really positive uses, so you don’t want to put the brakes on it. But, at the same time, there’s also potential for abuses of that kind of technology, so you do want regulations. It’s a classic dual-use kind of technology.”

    While skeptics are understandably concerned that Amazon’s foray into legislation may do little to nothing to protect the rights of everyday citizens, only time will tell if Amazon’s efforts are sincere or just another step toward a more Orwellian outcome.

  • Blackberry Announces New Cybersecurity R&D Unit

    Blackberry Announces New Cybersecurity R&D Unit

    Blackberry, once the de facto standard among smartphones, has struggled to remain relevant in the iPhone and Android era. A new initiative may help change that. According to a press release, the company is going back to its roots and doubling down on security.

    Throughout its history, Blackberry’s security has been legendary, based on strong encryption algorithms that have given government agencies and hackers alike a run for their money. Now, Blackberry Limited has created the Blackberry Advanced Technology Development Labs (Blackberry Labs), a new business unit that will focus on cybersecurity R&D.

    Company CTO Charles Eagan will head up Blackberry Labs and oversee a team of more than 120 software developers, researchers, architects, security experts and product leads. The team will focus on developing new technologies to help the Blackberry platform stay on the forefront of cybersecurity.

    The team will use machine learning and data science to analyze threats companies face, especially at a time when the Internet of Things (IoT) has drastically changed the nature of cybersecurity and opened companies to entirely new risks.

    “The establishment of BlackBerry Labs is the latest in a series of strategic moves we’ve taken to ensure our customers are protected across all endpoints and verticals in the new IoT,” said Charles Eagan, BlackBerry CTO. “Today’s cybersecurity industry is rapidly advancing and BlackBerry Labs will operate as its own business unit solely focused on innovating and developing the technologies of tomorrow that will be necessary for our sustained competitive success, from A to Z; Artificial Intelligence to Zero-Trust environments. We believe this highly experienced team will allow us to remain nimble, engaged and, above all else, proactive in our efforts to be the most trusted security software leader in the market.”

    At a time when cybersecurity and privacy are at the forefront of the tech industry, with the latter increasingly being considered a fundamental human right, Blackberry Labs could help the company regain lost ground.

  • U.S. Government Investing in AI Research

    U.S. Government Investing in AI Research

    The U.S. has been at the head of AI research since its inception but, in recent years, China has made significant headway and narrowed the gap. Now, according to a report in U.S. News & World Report, non-military AI research is set to get a significant boost by the U.S. government.

    In fact, in the president’s 2020 budget request, AI has its own category, with nearly $1 billion requested for non-military purposes. This represents approximately 12% of the total amount requested (PDF) by Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NSTC). The NSTC says the government will focus specifically on AI algorithms, enhanced performance and AI systems that better mimic human intelligence.

    Addressing one of the biggest concerns surrounding the development of AI, the NSTC said the research will also look for ways to promote “safe and effective methods for human–AI collaboration.” This could include anything from improved interfaces to human augmentation. Already, critics of AI development have labeled it humanity’s “biggest existential threat,” making it imperative to proceed safely and responsibly.

    In spite of the nearly $1 billion slated for AI development, however, many experts say it’s not enough to keep up with China. Without additional investments, the U.S. is still at risk of falling behind in what is shaping up to be one of the most important technological frontiers in history.

  • Chevron, Schlumberger and Microsoft Announce Collaboration to Create Oil Field Intelligence Platform

    Chevron, Schlumberger and Microsoft Announce Collaboration to Create Oil Field Intelligence Platform

    In what is considered to be an industry first, Chevron, Schlumberger and Microsoft have announced a three-party collaboration to accelerate the development of petrotechnical and digital technologies.

    DELFI is a stable, secure and open cloud-based environment for E&P software across the entire petrochemical lifecycle, including exploration, development and production. The three companies will work together to develop Azure-native applications in the DELFI environment.

    The collaboration will roll out in three phases. In the first phase, the companies will deploy the Petrotechnical Suite within the DELFI environment. The second phase will involve deploying Azure-based, cloud-native applications, while the third phase will be centered around the development of a suite of cognitive computing capabilities across the entire E&P value chain.

    All three companies are committed to ensuring their joint development efforts meet the latest security, performance and release management standards. In addition, the software will be compatible with the Open Subsurface Data Universe (OSDU) Data Platform, a standard data platform for the oil and gas industry. The OSDU’s stated goal is to ensure data is at the center of the industry, minimizing data silos.

    Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, touted the collaboration as “an enormous opportunity to bring the latest cloud and AI technology to the energy sector and accelerate the industry’s digital transformation. Our partnership with Schlumberger and Chevron delivers on this promise, applying the power of Azure to unlock new AI-driven insights that will help address some of the industry’s—the world’s—most important energy challenges, including sustainability.”

  • Compass Launches Consumer Site With AI-Driven Recommendations, Says CEO

    Compass Launches Consumer Site With AI-Driven Recommendations, Says CEO

    “We just launched a new consumer site that lets our agents collaborate with their clients,” says Compass founder and CEO Robert Reffkin. “It has features such as AI-driven recommendations exactly for the buyer. Based on everything that they’re searching it makes recommendations. It has another feature called Collections, which is a visual workplace. It allows the agent and their client to collaborate, discuss, and monitor the market in real-time.”

    Robert Reffkin, CEO of Compass, discusses their new AI-driven recommendations website and says that an “IPO is likely in their future” in an interview on CNBC:

    Compass Launches Consumer Site With AI-Driven Recommendations

    We’re building a platform to power all real estate decisions for advisors, sellers, and buyers. Agents come to grow their business, sellers come to sell their home for more money and less time, and buyers come to find the best listings. We just launched a new consumer site that lets our agents collaborate with their clients. It has features such as AI-driven recommendations exactly for the buyer. Based on everything that they’re searching it makes recommendations. It has another feature called Collections, which is a visual workplace. It allows the agent and their client to collaborate, discuss, and monitor the market in real-time.

    There are technology companies that focus on agents but not the consumer and there are technology companies that focus on the consumer but not the agent. We’re unique in that we’re focusing on both and really allowing them to collaborate together. What makes us a technology company is we have scale effects, we have network effects, flywheel effects, we have defensible IP technology and are asset-light. Our core flywheel is really an inventory based flywheel where we hire agents that bring inventory. With our new site, we create a great buyer experience which brings more traffic for agents. Then we build tools for our sellers to sell their homes for more money and in less time which allows them to bring even more inventory.

    An IPO Is Likely In Our Future

    An IPO is likely in our future. But I don’t go to sleep at night thinking about an IPO. I go to sleep and I think about how we can help our agents grow their business and better serve their clients. I look at all the companies that go public (including WeWork) to take lessons from them on what you can or cannot do. Real estate is a very large segment of our global economy. I think it’s the largest. However, (unlike WeWork) we’re not a landlord, we’re a very different type of business. 

    There’s excess inventory (in the New York market) on one hand but with low-interest rates, there has never been a low-interest-rate environment that hasn’t been good for real estate. So I think it’s a good time to be a buyer. Whether it’s the mansion tax, the transfer tax, or SALT, I think the real challenge there is the perception of taxes. When there’s a perception that taxes are going to increase that’s not good for real estate. Markets where there are a lot of software companies doing great such as Seattle, San Francisco, Austin, Boulder, and Nashville (are hot for real estate) but in any market, there are buying opportunities. I think just have to find the right agent to help you identify those.

    Compass Launches Consumer Site With AI-Driven Recommendations, Says CEO Robert Reffkin
  • VMware COO: We Have a Bigger Plan For Security

    VMware COO: We Have a Bigger Plan For Security

    “Fundamentally, we have a bigger plan for security,” says VMware COO Sanjay Poonen. “We felt it was the perfect time for us to come up with a disruptive play that was based on big data, was AI, and was cloud-based. There were only two companies doing it, CrowdStrike and Carbon Black. We felt Carbon Black was better integrated to us, had as good a product or better. We have a plan to integrate Carbon Black and make it intrinsic in a way that nobody else will do. We think this will transform the security industry that’s been broken today.”

    Sanjay Poonen, COO of VMware, elaborates on how they plan to transform security and lead the containers movement currently going on in digital transformation. Poonen was interviewed by Jim Cramer on CNBC:

    Containers Are A Movement Going On In Digital Transformation 

    When you look at these types of transformational moments going on in digital transformation, these happen once every 10 to 20 years. VMware is the company that invented the virtual machine and for the last 20 years, we’ve created a million jobs in that part of infrastructure. There is a movement going on in digital transformation right now called containers. We believe it’s our birthright to own that movement. There will be potentially tens of millions of jobs among developers created on top of this virtual machine. 

    Think of the virtual machine sort of like the ship and containers like the things on top of it. In the 1950s containers completely transformed ships and VMware created the ship. These containers are going to allow apps to be fundamentally transformed. We found as we thought about this that this was the right time to do it and it was our birthright to do it better than anybody else. Why not take those three thousand people in Pivotal and $750 million in revenue and turbocharge the next ten years of VMware, not just in virtual machines and virtualization in the path to the cloud, which is the first C, but the other C is containers. We think that’s a big part.

    We’re A Go-To-Market Machine

    Pivotal (is more valuable than the market initially believed) for two reasons. They’ve refactored their product which now sits completely on Kubernetes. If you don’t know what it is, it’s a sort of the big open-source container movement. And their go-to-market engine probably stuttered a little bit. But that’s what VMware does well. We’re a go-to-market machine. We’ll bring them in and accelerate this to our 500,000 customers. We feel good when we get a good product in the hands of our good go-to-market machine. I think we can accelerate it. 

    At VMware, no one person does it, it takes a village but also our partners like Dell and the ecosystem also. VMware has 75,000 partners who love us. We’re going to take this to those ecosystem partners. We have a big tent of system integrators and they’re excited about this. We branded the entire thing, that’s the other thing we’ve done pretty well. Tenzo, which is the Japanese word for containers, we’re doing big ads in New York, San Francisco, and London Airports. This is a play on the word VMware that says ContainerWare. We’re not changing the name of the company but we’re going big in containers and that’s the key message.

    We Have a Bigger Plan For Security

    Fundamentally, we have a bigger plan for security.  Let me just walk you through a quick understanding of the strategy. There are a lot of parallels with security and healthcare. My mom’s a doctor. Imagine you went to a doctor and you asked her how do you get well and she said you have to eat 5,000 tablets. Eating one every 30 seconds would take you a couple of weeks to do. That’s what the security industry is today. It’s 5,000 vendors, broken, with lots of different agents bloated on people’s laptops, lots of alerts showing up, and manual labor.

    We look at this and say there’s a fundamentally new way to do it, which is to make security intrinsic to your diet. You eat your vegetables, your fruit, you drink your water, brush your teeth, and that’s what we’re doing with security. We are making it part of our platform. 

    A Disruptive Play Based On Big Data, AI, and Cloud-Based

    We’ve been doing very well in network security around the NSX product but endpoint security and workload security we didn’t have much there. We had Workspace ONE, our AirWatch related product, and we found that many of these endpoint security players were kind of in a little internal turmoil. Symantec got bought by Broadcom. McAfee got bought by Intel and then was spun out again. We felt it was the perfect time for us to come up with a disruptive play that was based on big data, was AI, and was cloud-based.

    There were only two companies doing it, CrowdStrike and Carbon Black. We felt Carbon Black was better integrated to us, had as good a product or better, and we intend to acquire them. The acquisition hasn’t yet closed. We have a plan to integrate this and make it intrinsic in a way that nobody else will do. We laid that out at VMworld. We think this will transform the security industry that’s been broken today.

    VMware COO Sanjay Poonen: We Have a Bigger Plan For Security
  • AI-Powered Conversational Bots Are Changing the Game, Says LivePerson CEO

    AI-Powered Conversational Bots Are Changing the Game, Says LivePerson CEO

    “T-Mobile literally pulled the hold technology out,” says LivePerson CEO Robert Locascio. “Millions of customer at T-Mobile don’t have to be put on hold. There’s no press one or press two. They go straight to a person. You are messaging them. You are doing what’s natural to you. That’s really what we see as changing the game. We made a big pivot two years ago and launched a whole new platform. There’s a bigger future in bots and AI than there was in chat.”

    Robert Locascio, CEO of LivePerson, discusses how AI-powered conversational bots are being deployed and literally “changing the game” for customers of thousands of businesses using their Maven technology in an interview with Jim Cramer on CNBC:

    AI-Powered Conversational Bots Are Changing the Game

    We made a big pivot two years ago and launched a whole new platform and I said, “There’s a bigger future in bots and AI than there was in chat that I invented many years ago.” We went for it and as you can see the performance has been really great. I brought Alex Spinelli in about a year ago and he was running the core development team for Alexa. We brought in a lot of people from that group. The difference between us and Alexa is that we have thousands of brands (for our team) to work on. The Delta’s of the world and the T-Mobile’s of the world, instead of just one brand with Amazon.

    We do human interactions also, but we know a lot of those interactions can be automated. Just look at Delta. In a couple of weeks, instead of your flights late and you make a call on the phone and get put on hold, you are going to be able to message a contact center and talk to a bot in real-time to get what you want and change your flight. All of that will happen without you being on hold. That’s really why these brands are gravitating toward us. We are messaging with our friends and family. We are not calling people anymore. So why call a brand?

    T-Mobile literally pulled the hold technology out. Millions of customer at T-Mobile don’t have to be put on hold. There’s no press one or press two. They go straight to a person. You are messaging them. You are doing what’s natural to you. That’s really what we see as changing the game. Right now, Apple just opened up iMessages to businesses. Every business in the world is going to have to be on iMessage through our platform. Facebook Messenger too.

    Maven, LivePerson’s Conversational Engine

    We now have this thing called Brew to You, where right from your seat (in a stadium) you can have a bear and a hot dog delivered to you. But now we have something really cool which is out of the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas. There is a bot called Rose when you check in. She tells you everything about the hotel. She can help you cut the line at Marquee which is their cool club. This is all about people engaging with the brand and talking to this bot that’s just there for you. And after people leave the hotel they keep talking to Rose!

    What we are finding is that we take our technology which is called Maven, we enable the contact center reps to create the bots, deploy them, and own the bots. For example, we have a contact center down in the Dominican Republic and there’s a woman there named Laura that created a bot for GrillMaster, which is one of our customers. They deployed it and sold millions of dollars worth of grills. She was empowered to basically create that bot, deploy it, and change her life. She doubled her salary. That’s the power of this thing.

    AI Has Got to be Democratized

    EqualAI is a nonprofit we set up a couple of months ago. I started to realize that AI has got to be out there in the hands of many. It’s got to be democratized. It can’t just be with the big tech companies. What we want to do is take all the technology that we have (and make it available). It started with watching my two-year-old watching me command Alexa. Alexa turn on the lights. Alexa play music. She’s seen me command this AI and it’s a woman’s voice. I think what we are seeing now is that children are being affected by this. They are going to school, making demands, and following this.

    We have to change the way that we deploy AI and how we manage it. I wanted to bring the best practices into a nonprofit. We now have other people and brands who are joining us and taking part in this. One of the best practices that we are looking at is why do we have a woman’s voice with Alexa? It could be any voice. It could be a man. We have to think about these things before we deploy them to millions of people and we affect their lives.

    AI-Powered Conversational Bots Are Changing the Game, Says LivePerson CEO Robert Locascio

    Also read:

    Deepak Chopra Delivering Reflections on Alexa via LivePerson

  • OpenAI & Microsoft To Build AI That Will Change The World

    OpenAI & Microsoft To Build AI That Will Change The World

    “We’re working together with Microsoft to build next-generation supercomputers,” says OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman. “The real goal of OpenAI and what we’re trying to accomplish is to build what we call artificial general intelligence. They’re trying to build a computer system that is as capable as a human at being able to master a domain of study and being able to master more fields of study than any one human can. We think whoever builds artificial general intelligence will be the number one most valuable company in the world by a huge margin.”

    Greg Brockman, OpenAI co-founder and chairman, discusses Microsoft’s $1 billion investment in OpenAI and how whoever invents artificial general intelligence first will become the most valuable company in the world. Brockman was interviewed by Bloomberg Technology: 

    OpenAI Working With Microsoft To Build AI That Will Change The World

    We’re working together with Microsoft to build next-generation supercomputers. The real goal of OpenAI and what we’re trying to accomplish is to build what we call artificial general intelligence. They’re trying to build a computer system that is as capable as a human at being able to master a domain of study and being able to master more fields of study than any one human can. If we succeed the kind of thing that we want to be able to do is, for example, build a computer system that can solve medicine better than humans can. If you think about how humans solve medicine today we do it by increased specialization. 

    I have a friend who’s going through medical procedures right now where he talks to a first doctor who does an ultrasound but can’t read it so he has to go to a different doctor who doesn’t really have context as to what’s going on. This is not a problem that we can solve by increasing the amount of knowledge that humans have to learn. There’s only so much we can fit in our minds. What we really need are tools that are capable of helping us solve these problems. That’s the kind of thing that we want to apply general intelligence to. 

    Our goal is to distribute the economic benefits of artificial general intelligence. You can imagine a general intelligence system that can generate huge amounts of value. If you look at the top ten most valuable companies in the world, seven of them are technology companies. We think whoever builds artificial general intelligence will be the number one by a huge margin. It’s really important that those benefits go to everyone rather than being locked up in one place.

    Building Powerful Safe and Secure AI Technology 

    There’s a second part which is it’s really important that you keep these systems safe and secure and that you build them with ethics in the forefront. That’s something that both we and Microsoft are very aligned on doing from the beginning. What it really boils down to is that AI technology is becoming very powerful. That means that there’s both these amazing benefits and these amazing applications. Imagine a personalized tutor that can really understand you that is available for free to every person on the planet. That’s the kind of thing we should be able to build with the kind of systems that we want to create. 

    You also have to ask the questions of what are the risks. How can they be misused? Today, we already see AI technology, for example, deepfakes, that already has bad implications in the world. How do we maximize those benefits and mitigate the downsides? That’s our goal. Our goal is to push the technology forward and make sure that we’re capturing those benefits while making sure everyone benefits from them. But we also want to make sure that we keep it safe and secure to mitigate the downsides.

    AI Computational Power Growing 5 Times Faster Than Moore’s Law

    The timelines (of where AI will take us) are always really hard to predict. One story I really like thinking about is just looking, for example, at previous technological innovations. In 1878, Thomas Edison announced that he was going to create the incandescent lamp and gas securities in England fell. So British Parliament put together a commission of distinguished experts who came out to Menlo Park. They checked everything out. They said this isn’t going to work and one year later he shipped. I think that we’re in a similar sort of place here where it’s hard to predict what the future will be like. 

    We’re in this exponential right now where the computational power that we’re using is growing five times faster than Moore’s Law. What we do know is every year we’re going to have unprecedented AI technologies. We’ve been doing that for seven years and OpenAI has been doing it for three. This year we have systems that can understand and generate text. I think five years from now we should expect that we will have systems that you can really have meaningful conversations with. I think that we should see within a bunch of different domains, a lot of systems that can work with humans to augment what they can do much further than anything we can imagine today.

    OpenAI Working With Microsoft To Build AI That Will Change The World – OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman
  • AI Is Really Going To Change Everything

    AI Is Really Going To Change Everything

    “We think that AI is really going to change everything,” says BeyondMinds co-founder Or Kramer. “We consider it the fourth revolution. It feels like AI is a huge buzzword right now and everything is AI and actually, it’s true. In the last five years, there has been incredible academic revelations and advancements that are now allowing anyone that has data to do so much more with it than what they could just a couple of years ago. Every week there’s a new like state-of-the-art article that is being published and it’s changing completely how we do things.”

    Or Kramer, co-founder of BeyondMinds, discusses how AI is going to change everything and how his startup is helping companies like Microsoft incorporate AI into products. Kramer was interviewed by Lidar Grave Lazi on ILTV ISRAEL DAILY:

    It Feels Lik Everything Is AI and Actually, It’s True

    It feels like AI is a huge buzzword right now and everything is AI and actually, it’s true. In the last five years, there has been incredible academic revelations and advancements that are now allowing anyone that has data to do so much more with it than what they could just a couple of years ago. It really affects all industries together. Around 75 percent of CEOs now believe they want to incorporate AI, although they don’t necessarily know how to. That’s where we come to play. But in general, AI really has the power to automate and make processes much more efficient.

    I think that in this particular industry still, academia is where most research is being done. Also, some private sector companies like Google and Facebook have a huge amount of AI research going on. However, most companies currently don’t have the capability to have this type of research in-house. It’s still a very difficult thing to do. The math is great but it’s still not very easily applicable. There is new stuff coming from academia every day. Every week there’s a new like state-of-the-art article that is being published and it’s changing completely how we do things. The connection between the research side of it to the practice side of it or the application side of it is still challenging to many organizations.

    There Are So Many Advances Going On With AI

    We basically act as the expert in the room for everything deep learning or everything AI in general. That means that we, across different use cases, mostly computer vision, natural language processing, signal processing, reinforcement learning, and speech, are basically the fields. Every one of them is like its own world. We provide this multidisciplinary approach where we have a bunch of experts that can really break through those particular instances that are really hard to solve. We’re working with companies on a variety of products that they have across the organizations where deep learning can be implemented.

    The field of natural language processing is a particular area we have been focusing on and has been really evolving over the last few years. In general, what you’re trying to do with AI is make better decisions. So a lot of the decision support systems or decision-making systems are now available in much higher accuracy than even a year ago because there are so many advances going on right now. So really anything that is allowing employees to go and do something else that they’re probably more efficient in and any type of procedure that is currently done either not very accurately or is very manual intensive could be resolved with the deep learning much better than it was it used to be. 

    AI Is Really Going To Change Everything

    We think that AI is really going to change everything. We consider it the fourth revolution. However, a lot of times it seems to be a little bit scary (to people). When you picture AI you think of general disruptions, that it’s going to replace organizations, we’re going to do everything by robots, and it’s not necessarily the case. I think the good thing about AI is that it really empowers the organizations that have data. Pretty much every organization has data that is useful to really improve the product and to really improve what they’re offering is. 

    It is not necessarily as scary as some people think. There are processes that are going to be automated. For instance, the autonomous cars industry is going to be completely disrupted probably. But I think in general it will make the world better in the sense that we will do more of the things that we really need to have a human in the loop and less of what is currently very very technical.

    AI Is Really Going To Change Everything, says BeyondMinds co-founder Or Kramer
  • The Future Of The Economy With AI

    The Future Of The Economy With AI

    By some estimates artificial intelligence could add $13 trillion to the global economy over the next decade, but many companies are unwilling or unsure about how to implement AI in their own businesses. In that timeframe, up to 70% of businesses could implement some form of AI to streamline or simplify their business. AI can take over repetitive tasks, freeing humans up for things that require more critical thought, and it can also take over dangerous or strenuous tasks, preventing humans from sustaining injuries. AI can predict when maintenance comes due, preventing costly breakdowns, and it can optimize driving routes and truck space to reduce waste. There may even be things that AI will do over the coming decade that we haven’t even thought about. Is your business ready for the AI economy?

    The AI economy is going to require some growing pains. Companies that have always done something one way are going to suddenly struggle to keep up with their AI-using counterparts. Jobs will be eliminated as AI takes over repetitive and dangerous tasks and starts to do the high-level calculations that only humans and supercomputers can do currently. The use of AI will displace workers worldwide but also open up new jobs at the same time, so training and retrofitting will be crucial to ensure the next decade isn’t marked by mass unemployment.

    There are some companies and even governments working to bring AI to the masses for the betterment of humankind. Since 2011 Google has been developing its Brain AI in order to bring AI to the masses, and just this year the U.S. Government passed laws to expand AI resources as well as safety guidelines. The United Kingdom has announced its plans to lead the world in ethical AI development, while the European Union plans to invest €20 billion in researching the technology. China is developing regulations and technology side-by-side, with a hope to become a world leader in both.

    Over the coming decade, AI utilization will increase 3-5 times the current adoption rate, and AI will be able to skyrocket growth up to 200%. By 2030, non repetitive jobs with high digital skills will grow 10%, while lower-skilled jobs with fewer technical skills will drop by 10%. 

    AI can:

    • Forecast demand
    • Optimize shipping routes
    • Predict Maintenance
    • Reduce fuel and power usage
    • Increase quality standards
    • Reduce mistakes
    • Optimize scheduling

    Artificial intelligence can add significantly to the global economy, but yet many companies are unsure how to implement it. Currently only about 10% of companies have invested in AI and are ahead of the curve, but a quarter of companies have just not committed to using AI and 65% of companies have not or can’t afford to use AI technology.

    Worldwide, as many as 375 million workers may need to change occupations, while all workers will have to adapt to working alongside artificial intelligence. It will be scary, but there is a high likelihood that AI will greatly benefit society. Learn more about the AI economy from the infographic below.