Artificial Intelligence Start Up Works Towards Computer Sentience

 Artificial Intelligence  

Sentient Technologies is the latest big artificial intelligence company to emerge from stealth with heavy funding.  The company which claims to have developed the largest distributed AI system claims it will help automate decision-making.

Investment in artificial intelligence has been ramping up dramatically in the last few years.  Deep learning ventures like Vicarious, Nervana Systems, and Alchemy API have attracted a lot of funding, now an MIT-based start up has announced a major funding round as it emerges from stealth.

Sentient Technologies, is creating distributed AI software and they are already installing at key customer sites.  They claim their artificial intelligence goes beyond natural language recognition, unstructured searching, machine learning, and deep knowledge.

According to their website, Sentient has created the largest and most powerful intelligent system in the world.

"You have reasoning, and you have logic," says Sentient co-founder and chief scientist, Babak Hodjat. "Beyond that what intelligence entails is sentience.  That's what we're shooting for."

Sentient, which has about 60 employees, was operating in stealth in San Francisco under the name Genetic Finance Holding Ltd. The company was started nearly seven years ago by a team that worked on the technology that later became Siri, the voice recognition software in Apple Inc.’s iPhone that understands and learns from human speech.

"The key to making good decisions whether they be made by a computer or a person is understanding, and that distinguishes us from companies that are purely looking for statistical patterns in data."

Chief Executive Antoine Blondeau said Sentient so far has proven its technology in the trading space, where it started out, and also in medical research. The company worked with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) team on detecting sepsis, which is a top killer of patients in intensive care units, by analyzing blood pressure in more than 6,000 patients in real time and predicting within about 30 minutes whether a patient was likely to succumb.

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“The scale is key,” he said. “When we run on thousands of sites and millions of CPUs, we can solve problems of a much higher order.”

"Sentience is being aware, having perceptions, being mindful, and has implications of autonomy," chief technology officer Nigel Duffy states.

"For me, if you look at the history of technology in general its worked to ease our burdens. So it started out removing unskilled manual labor and skilled manual labor and now some clerical tasks and what AI promises is to relieve some of our intellectual burdens and our decision-making burdens," says Duffy.

"The key to making good decisions whether they be made by a computer or a person is understanding, and that distinguishes us from companies that are purely looking for statistical patterns in data," he says.

According to Hojat, excepting Horizons Ventures, Sentient Technologies has shunned the usual venture capital route to glory by instead enlisting support from its actual users in the fields of finance, consumer, food/beverage, and real estate for the last seven years, quietly showing demonstrations of how its distributed artificial intelligence, crafted in collaborative research with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and other partners, works for medical research, financial trading, and other big data applications.

Artificial intelligence has been a popular area of investment, and is spurring AI to new levels. Blondeau argues that none of them so far have figured out how to scale and distribute artificial intelligence to the extent that Sentient has, although he does acknowledge work done at Google. and IBM and says they are potential partners for Sentient.



SOURCE  Wall Street Journal, Sentient 

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