Investing In Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence is one of the most exciting and transformative opportunities of our time. From my vantage point as a venture investor atPlayfair Capital, where I focus on investing and building community around AI, I see this as a great time for investors to help build companies in this space. There are three key reasons.

First, with 40 percent of the world’s population now online, and more than 2 billion smartphones being used with increasing addiction every day (KPCB), we’re creating data assets, the raw material for AI, that describe our behaviors, interests, knowledge, connections and activities at a level of granularity that has never existed.

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5 Things About The Plan Of Open Source Artificial Intelligence

Arguably, the open source movement — the idea that a group of technologists freely contributing their own work and commenting on the work of others, can create a final product that is comparable with anything that a commercial enterprise might create — has been one of the great innovation catalysts of the technology industry.

It’s no wonder, then, that a group of Silicon Valley luminaries — including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman — have lined up to contribute $1 billion to a new open-source AI project known as OpenAI that is led by Ilya Sutskever, one of the world’s top experts in machine learning. If you can open-source software and hardware, then why not open-source artificial intelligence, right?
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk Leads Billion-Dollar Project To Save World From Artificial Intelligence Takeover

Two tech titans have launched a billion-dollar non-profit that they hope will keep the world safe from an artificial intelligence takeover.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator announced the launch of Open AI, a project to democratize technology and ensure that one one person or entity ever controls enough artificial intelligence to take over the world.

It’s a lofty premise, but one that takes its cue straight from a James Bond movie: every villain had a wicked plan to rule mankind. Musk and Altman believe a real-life Dr. Evil could someday bring the world to its knees.

Basically, Open AI is a research lab where a cadre of scientists work to create and advance digital intelligence and make that information available to everyone. The open source philosophy will serve as a balance to the private, for-profit model, in which technology is created in service to a few.

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Economics And The Future of Artificial Intelligence

Ask any technological expert, and he or she is certain to have their own variation as to the definition of “singularity.” However, no matter which definition of singularity you choose to go by, according to Author, Artificial Intelligence Researcher and Smith College Professor of Economics Dr. James D. Miller, economics will play a big role in its advent.

Miller, who defines singularity as “a period of time at which an increase in human or machine intelligence radically changes civilization,” doesn’t make broad predictions about what could happen when it occurs, noting that it may turn into a Utopia or it could destroy society (read more about his book, Singularity Rising, in this review by Humanity+). While everyone who subscribes to the idea of singularity sees it stemming from automation at some point in the future, Miller goes back to the principles described by Adam Smith in the 1700s to illustrate the part economics will play.

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Wikipedia launches edit-checking artificial intelligence

The new AI will check to see if an edit is "damaging"
The new AI will check to see if an edit is “damaging”

Wikipedia has launched a tool designed to automatically highlight low-quality edits to articles.

The Objective Revision Evaluation Service software has been trained by Wikipedia editors to recognise the quality of an edit based on the language and context of the change.

There are about half a million changes to Wikipedia articles every day.

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New Google API for developers helps classify pictures according to what’s in them

Developers can now easily build powerful applications that understand the content of images thanks to new machine vision tools released by Google.

The company unveiled the beta of its Cloud Vision API on Wednesday, giving select developers an opportunity to run advanced image processing services that let their applications more easily handle pictures. Applications can use the tools to do things like identify the most important thing in an image, determine how someone feels from their picture, and detect whether the content of an image is inappropriate.

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