A Word on AI #3 — January 21st 2018
Best of what I consumed this week
MIT Technology Review — “Amazon’s Checkout-Free Grocery Store Is Opening to the Public” — Definitely the headline of the week. Phase 1 of Amazon plan was to launched Amazon Go, the first store with no line and no checkout. Up until now, it has been available to Amazon’s employees at this address: 2131 7th Ave, Seattle, WA. Starting Monday, the store will be open to the public. So, if you end up in Seattle, go check it out :-)
Reuters — “Facebook to open digital training hubs in Europe” — In December, Facebook became one of the first large technology companies to shake up its taxstructure and book less of its revenue in Ireland, as multinationals come under pressure to pay tax in the countries where they operate. Still under scrutiny, Facebook just announced a $12mm investment in a new R&D facility in France for Artificial Intelligence and other digital training hubs in Europe.
Samsung — “Samsung Advocates for Collaborative AI Research at 2018 Artificial Intelligence Summit” — Samsung hosted its Artificial Intelligence summit the past week. The summit welcomed over 300 academics, technical experts, and university students. Interesting topics were discussed among which collaborative data workflow and the future of language interface. Worth noticing that there were no women among the speakers.
Venture Beat — “ A candid take on the future of AI and job automation” — 800 million workers could loose their jobs by 2030. That’s according to a new McKinsey report covering 46 nations and more than 800 occupations. The jobs that will be left are the ones that require human intelligence and/or creativity as those are the most difficult to replicate by machines.
