Artificial Intelligence…The Final Frontier
Andrew Ng (@AndrewYNg), founder of the “Google Brain” project, co-founder of Coursera and now Chief Scientist at Baidu, tells a story of a time when he thought Artificial Intelligence was impossible. As a professor Andrew even suggested to some of his students to pursue other fields outside of AI for fear that they would be disappointed by the lack of progress in this field.
Then, he created the deep learning project at Google. Using a massive neural network, and an unprecedented amount of data, the team doubled the image-recognition performance of prior state-of-the-art algorithms.
Andrew realized a new path forward. Instead of programmers writing algorithms to perform an action, deep learning is programmers writing algorithms for computers, using massive data, to teach themselves how to do things that programmers can never teach them to do.
Eureka!
Andrew’s project at Google seemed to set off the beginnings of an arms race. Facebook hired computer vision pioneer Yann LeCun to run its AI lab in NYC and Baidu reeled in Ng for a new AI lab in Silicon Valley. Google nabbed Mr. Singularity himself, Ray Kurzweil, to oversee all engineering. It also acquired deep-learning company DeepMind for a reported $400–500 million, and has brought another dozen robotics and AI startups.
On the funding side, in 2013, investors poured $581 million in 142 deals to startups in the AI field. This is a 3X increase from the $178 million invested in 2009.
Even at these increased levels, we are barely scratching the surface of innovation in Artificial Intelligence. The $581 million invested in AI in 2013 is compared to $11.5 billion invested in the overall software industry (so 5.2% of the overall sector).
Last year, Anki had its coming out party at Apple’s WWDC. The demo gave a peak into the secretive company’s inner working. Thus far, the only application the company has announced is toy racing cars. I suspect there is more under the hood than meets the eyes as the company continues to deploy $50 million from A16Z, Index Ventures, and Two Sigma Ventures.
More recently, the founders of Siri made their latest company, Viv, a public topic in a WIRED profile. Viv strives to be the first consumer-friendly assistant that truly achieves that promise by opening up its algorithms to a wide variety of applications. Viv is building on the latest in natural language processing to help computers better understand all forms of natural human questions in 1/20th of a second. Viv got its founding investor Horizons Ventures to contribute $10 million to its efforts.
Meanwhile, Vicarious, which raised $60 million from Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Vinod Khosla, Aaron Levie, Ashton Kutcher and a long list of others, is working on replicating the neocortex of the human brain. The company is using neuroscience and biology to develop a unified algorithmic architecture to achieve human-level intelligence in vision, language, and motor control.
From bad science fiction (Transcendence) to great scientists (Stephen Hawking), everyone lately seems to have a view about the implications of Artificial Intelligence. I think the choice is ours to make. Using this framework borrowed from you know who, we have several options. We can be optimistic or pessimistic, determinate or indeterminate about the future of AI.
- Indeterminate Pessimistic — AI will cause disruption to existing jobs (watch: Humans Need Not Apply) and we won’t be able to handle the change so we wait for things to happen in the meantime and go on cruises. We don’t know how fast or slow the end is coming.
- Determinate Pessimistic — aka the grey goo scenario. Intelligent, self-replicating nanobots take over the planet and consumes everything. Since the future is bleak, we must prepare for it. Disaster is not an abstraction, we know what’s going to happen.
- Indeterminate Optimistic — AI can change things, but we don’t really think we can influence its trajectory, might as well wait for it to come about. Indeterminate optimists think the future will be better but doesn’t know exactly how it’s going to pan out, so they rearranges things that already exist. The result is application over research and rehashing over creation.
- Determinate Optimistic — We are in control of our own destiny. We build and fund AI companies and products that free humanity from mental drudgery. Society finds more valuable pursuits with our newfound free time. Determinant optimists believe that everything that we thought of as science fiction in the 20th Century will be science in the 21st Century and that we are going to create it.
Silicon Valley has always been the land of determinant optimists. Technological change has made human life better when we take an optimistic determinate view and actively control the path of innovation.
If you actually read Stephen Hawking’s article closely, it is not a doomsday scenario (pessimistic determinate) as the headlines might suggest nor is Hawking’s message indeterminate, he is instead advocating for more research and more discussion on ways that humanity can influence the future of AI development.
The entrepreneurial and investor community is actively creating and funding another generation of amazing technology companies built on artificial intelligence. That’s a great trend that we have to optimistically and deterministically push forward so that technology may accomplish its next grand feat: to boldly go where no machine has gone before.
Appendix
Select list of Artificial Intelligence startups and funding.
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