Artificial Intelligence  

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg  has posted that he is intending to build himself an artificial intelligence assistant to help run his house and work with him in his business. In his own words, "You can think of it kind of like Jarvis in Iron Man."

Along with learning Mandarin, reading two books every month, and meet a new person every day, Facebook founder and new father Mark Zuckerberg just announced an ambitious new goal for himself: he is planning on creating J.A.R.V.I.S.

"My personal challenge for 2016 is to build a simple AI to run my home and help me with my work. You can think of it kind of like Jarvis in Iron Man," the tech billionaire wrote on his Facebook wall.

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"I'm going to start by exploring what technology is already out there," Zuckerberg writes. "Then I'll start teaching it to understand my voice to control everything in our home -- music, lights, temperature and so on. I'll teach it to let friends in by looking at their faces when they ring the doorbell."

"My personal challenge for 2016 is to build a simple AI to run my home and help me with my work. You can think of it kind of like Jarvis in Iron Man."

Zuckerberg envisions the artificial intelligence as a parental aide: "I'll teach it to let me know if anything is going on in Max's room that I need to check on when I'm not with her."

More than just for the home, the digital assistant will help him run his business affairs too. "On the work side, it'll help me visualize data in VR to help me build better services and lead my organizations more effectively."

Every year, I take on a personal challenge to learn new things and grow outside my work at Facebook. My challenges in...
Posted by Mark Zuckerberg on Sunday, January 3, 2016

Zuckerberg plans on doing most of the work himself. " it's a different kind of rewarding to build things yourself, so this year my personal challenge is to do that. This should be a fun intellectual challenge to code this for myself. I'm looking forward to sharing what I learn over the course of the year."

What do you think, is Zuckerberg looking to take on Elon Musk as a real-world Tony Stark?

SOURCE  Mark Zuckerberg

By 33rd Square

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 Artificial Intelligence  

Major investors including Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Ashton Kutcher are joining Peter Thiel with a $40 million investment in Vicarious FPC, a stealthy artificial-intelligence company that has already turned heads with it's CAPTCHA-beating algorithms.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have just invested $40m in the company that recently announced their artificial intelligence could decipher CAPTCHAs.

Joining Peter Thiel, the PayPal billionaire, whose Founders Fund targets cutting edge technology and Ashton Kutcher, actor and tech investor, also investing, Zuckerberg and Musk are also joined by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz.

A Facebook spokesman said Zuckerberg’s investment in Vicarious, which hasn’t been previously reported, is a personal one and does not reflect Facebook’s interest in using Vicarious software.

"Translate the neocortex into computer code and 'you have a computer that thinks like a person,'" says Vicarious co-founder Scott Phoenix. 'Except it doesn’t have to eat or sleep.'”

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According to Vicarious’s website, the company is developing “machine learning software based on the computational principles of the human brain."

"Our first technology is a visual perception system that interprets the contents of photographs and videos in a manner similar to humans. Powering this technology is a new computational paradigm we call the Recursive Cortical Network.”

Company founder D. Scott Phoenix told the Wall Street Journal that if they are successful, Vicarious will have created "a computer that thinks like a person except it doesn't need to eat or sleep".  Essentially they are trying to build a human neocortex in silico.

Phoenix said his aim was to create a computer that can understand not just shapes and objects but the textures associated with them. He said he hopes Vicarious’s computers will learn to how to cure diseases and create cheap, renewable energy, as well as performing the jobs that employ most human beings. “We tell investors that right now, human beings are doing a lot of things that computers should be able to do,” he said.

Vicarious, whose other co-founder was neuroscientist Dileep George, is a long way from accomplishing its goals. Phoenix says the company won’t make a profit anytime soon and it has said very little about how its technology works. It hasn’t even disclosed its exact address, for fear it might be the target of corporate espionage or hacking.

The investment parallel's other major funding announcements for artificial intelligence ventures, including IBM's spin-off of the Watson Group, a 2,000-employee division dedicated to developing its self-learning super-computer, numerous Google robotics and AI acquisitions and Facebook's creation of it's own AI Lab.




SOURCE  Wall Street Journal

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 Artificial Intelligence  

With artificial intelligence, a technology Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg highlighted as a key research area at a recent earnings call, the social network may soon understand not only what we do on the Facebook, but what we mean, or what we really want.

On a recent earnings call with investment analysts, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the company has a new Artificial Intelligence unit and, also, the company is separately developing a new speech recognition product.

According to Zuckerberg,

In September, we formed the Facebook AI Group to do world-class artificial intelligence research using all the knowledge that people have shared on Facebook. The goal here is to use new approaches in AI to help make sense of all the content that people share so we can generate new insights about the world to answer people's questions

Facebook AI being based on "all the content people share" seems like a reference to the over 1.2 trillion user posts the company is now trying to make searchable.

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Zuckererg continued:

We started assembling a team of some of the best people in the field to work on these problems. We also announced the acquisition of Mobile Technologies, a speech recognition and machine translation company that will help expand our work in the field beyond just photo recognition to voice. Over time, I think it is going to be possible to build services that are much more natural to interact with and can help solving many more problems than any existing technologies today. I am excited that we are working on this problem and I am looking forward to doing a lot more here.

Such a natural interaction model indicates Facebook wants to harmonize an AI and speech recognition system. Mobile Technologies work in translation software will also help Facebook be more competitive globally, and expand their software capabilities beyond an English-focused underpinning.  Josh Costine at TechCrunch suggests, "If Facebook can find a way to surmount this hurdle and allow us to communicate despite our different tongues, it could promote greater racial and international tolerance." Of course, It could also help advertisers reach a much wider audience without very much extra work.

Why would a social networking system want to develop AI? Bhiksha Raj, a machine learning expert at Carnegie Mellon University, told Singularity Hub, “Places like Google and Facebook now have so much data that the kinds of networks you can train and the kinds of things you can learn from that have basically been unimaginable.”
So conceivably, Facebook in the future may know more about you, than you know yourself.




SOURCE  Business Insider

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