Artificial Intelligence  

Scaled Inference, a new company started by two ex-Google employees, is building machine learning technology similar to what’s used internally by companies like Google, making it available as a cloud service that can be used by anyone.

According to their website, Scaled Inference, is "enabling a new generation of intelligent software built by the masses and powered by an open shared platform."

The eight month-old company started by two ex-Google employees, is developing machine learning software as a cloud service.  They are automating the process so that the machines themselves will choose their method of solving a particular problem rather than relying on human experts to do it for them.

"We want to remove experts from the loop almost completely, where machines are given the data and the problem–the problem of detecting, say, [whether an image is] cats–and the machine can itself figure out what [mathematical] model would work best."

The result will be a system that can compute a variety of problems involving artificial intelligence with nearly any kind of data.

Scaled Inference has yet to launch a public product, but it expects to have a working prototype together soon and is now bringing together companies for a closed trial of the platform.

Olcan Sercinoglu–the co-founder of Scaled Inference Inc., told the WSJ he thinks biological systems are fundamentally different from machines and can’t be directly compared.

Scaled Inference has now raised $13.6 million at a valuation of about $60 million to build the software.

Scaled Inference is approaching the problem differently than competitors, according to Sercinoglu, by using a mathematical approach that takes advantage of machines’ ability to calculate rather than trying to emulate biological systems, about which he said too little is known.

“We want to remove experts from the loop almost completely,” he said, “where machines are given the data and the problem–the problem of detecting, say, [whether an image is] cats–and the machine can itself figure out what [mathematical] model would work best.”

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Scaled Inference’s software is said to be able to solve multiple types of problems with credit card data, using anomaly detection to find fraud and pattern detection to predict events such as what a customer is likely to purchase, which is unusual for a single system, he said.

“There are not enough people who can do it well, and companies like Scaled Inference are in a position to reduce the level of expertise needed to do machine learning,” said investor Vinod Khosla, adding that “machine learning systems introduce the need for machine learning science,” which is what Scaled Inference is working on.

“Ultimately, the ability of machines to solve more general problems, general artificial intelligence in the future, is really through getting down at principals and solving the model selection problem,” he said.

Sercinoglu and his co-founder, Dmitry Lepikhin, both spent several years working at Google where Sercinoglu started as an intern to Google Senior Fellow Jeffrey Dean and others.

He joined Google full time in 2002 and was an early contributor to Google’s infrastructure, which allows developers to routinely use tens of thousands of machines. He also worked on Google Borg, which manages Google’s servers; Google’s search infrastructure, which indexes Web pages; and Google Trends, which computes what people are searching for.

Then he moved into Google Research, where he reported to Peter Norvig, an expert in artificial intelligence, and became interested in how to scale artificial intelligence and machine learning across thousands of machines.

He left Google to start Scaled Inference in May.


SOURCE  Wall Street Journal

By 33rd Square

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 Futurology  

For anyone curious about what goes on at Google, listening to Larry Page and Sergey Brin talk together is a pretty rare opportunity. In a recent discussion with venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, the mix of Page's deep philosophical ideas, and Brin's humor makes for interesting viewing.

G
oogle co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin had an informal discussion recently with billionaire venture capitalist Vinod Khosla. During the chat, the co-founders talked about Google's early days, its current projects, and its future.

The pair questioned our present economic system that keep us working 40+ hour work-weeks.

Page and Brin, who rarely take the stage together for interviews, began the talk with Khosla recalling Google's aborted sale to search engine Excite in 1999. Khosla, who helped found Sun Microsystems, was an investor in Excite at the time. Page and Brin say they eventually pulled out of the deal — worth either $350,000, according to Khosla, or more than a million according to the co-founders — because Excite lacked the "passion" for search that the nascent Google embodied.

Google's self-driving car prototype

The trio look at how Google is now such a diverse company that it is not easy to define.  Previously associated mainly with search, the company is now involved in self-driving cars, robotics, space, and health care.

When the subject turned to the future of employment and the increasing phenomenon of technological unemployment being created by the very technology Google is creating, Page and Brin talked about

"I totally believe we should be living in an age of Abundance, as in the Peter Diamandis book. The idea that everyone needs to work frantically to meet peoples' needs is just not true."

"I totally believe we should be living in an age of Abundance, as in the Peter Diamandis book," said Page. "The idea that everyone needs to work frantically to meet peoples' needs is just not true."  Page goes on to look at what companies might do in the short-term to extend employment, by running four-day work-weeks or job sharing full time positions between two part-time ones.

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Brin does quibble with Page on this.  "I don't think that in the near term the need for labor is going away," he says.  "It gets shifted from one area to another, but people always want more stuff, or more entertainment or more creativity, or whatever."

Khosla asks the pair about how the economy has shifted from one of labor and capital, to one of ideas, and how most economists haven't caught on to this notion.  "Ideas are disproportionately a large part of the growth of the economy," he states.  Khosla views this as leading to a major amplification of income inequality in society.

Further on, Page talks about how Google's diverse developments are at a foundation-level are interrelated.  The employees are more engaged he says, and they can function more as self-directed project teams. Brin states that GoogleX is intentionally focused on being different than the core company, looking at "atoms, not bits."

At the end of the talk, an audience member asks about what Government 2.0 might look like.  Page talks about how the complexity and amount of rules and regulations in government keeps increasing over time, but is not in pace with the changes in society.  "Despite people being good and well meaning, government will eventually collapse under its own weight."


SOURCE  Khosla Ventures

By 33rd Square

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