Superintelligence  

Baidu CEO and chairman Robin Li interviewed Bill Gates and Elon Musk at the Boao Forum, last month. The discussion ranged from entrepreneurship to philanthropy, from "summoning the demon" of artificial intelligence to the pros and cons of technocratic government, to automated driving, and more.

In the session, "Dialogue: Technology & Innovation for a Sustainable Future" during the 2015 Boao Forum for Asia (BFA) in Boao, China, last month, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk were jointly interviewed by Baidu CEO Robin Li.

In the video above, (it is not the greatest quality, but content-wise is very good), Gates and Musk each discuss some of their early challenges in creating their companies and gaining incredible wealth.

When asked how he manages his multiple companies, Musk replies, "I wouldn't really recommend this.  It's not good for quality of life."

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In term of artificial intelligence, Gates stated that he would highly recommend Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence. During the interview Gates echoed Musk’s concerns with future superintelligence safety, with Musk noting that a good analogy would be “if you consider nuclear research, with its potential for a very dangerous weapon: releasing the energy is easy; containing that energy safely is very difficult. And so I think the right emphasis for AI research is on AI safety.”

"We've essentially been building the content base for the superintelligence."

"We have a general purpose learning algorithm, that evolution has endowed us with," comments Gates. "It's running in an extremely slow computer," he states while pointing at his own head. "It has very limited memory size, [no] ability to send data to other computers—we have to use this funny mouth thing here, whenever we build a new one, it starts over, it doesn't know how to walk...."

"As soon as this algorithm—of taking experience and turning it into knowledge—which is so amazing, and we have not done in software—as soon as you do that, it's not clear you'll even know when you're just at the human level," he continues. "You'll be at the superhuman level almost as soon as that algorithm is implanted in silicon."

As Watson demonstrated, such an intelligence can then go forward and read all the content of the internet.  "We've essentially been building the content base for the superintelligence." Gates wonders how other people cannot see this as a huge challenge for humanity in the not-to-distant future.


SOURCE  Adam Ford

By 33rd Square

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 Artificial Intelligence  

Baidu says it is building a 100-billion-neuron deep learning system and that it will be complete within six months, powering a fast transition away from text for search requests. With smartphones and the company's new Baidu Eye technology, the company expects voice and image search to be more used than text.

Chinese search engine company Baidu is working on a massive computing cluster for deep learning that will be 100 times larger than the cat-recognizing system Google built in 2012 and that should be complete in six months.

Baidu Chief Scientist and machine learning expert Andrew Ng told Bloomberg News recently.  Ng, who was chiefly responsible for the system used at Google to recognize cats, called the Google Brain, joined Baidu in May this year.

"About 10 percent of Baidu search queries are done by voice. Within five years, voice and image searches will surpass text queries"

Ng and his team will use graphics processing units, or GPUs for the creation of their neural network.

"I hope that this will allow us to make incremental improvements to some of the current deep learning applications within Baidu, to support those teams–search, advertising, language translations, optical character recognition, speech recognition," Ng told Forbes recently.

Where the Google Brain was part of a research project  Baidu’s 100-billion-neural-connection system will be handling live search traffic for Baidu’s hundreds of millions of users. Baidu is trying to do some heavy AI work with Ng and his team, as well as Baidu’s Beijing-based artificial intelligence lab.

Baidu CEO Robin Li told Bloomberg that 10 percent of the company’s search queries are currently done by voice, and that voice and image search will surpass text queries within five years.

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At the Baidu World conference this week, the company also announced its lens-less version of Google Glass, called Baidu Eye, which is suspected to be heavily reliant on deep learning, audio and voice control. The device features a camera on one side of the headset analyzes the things it sees around it and sends audio information into an earpiece on the other side, as well as to a smartphone. Users can control Eye via voice commands or gestures.

Deep learning capability by computers configured to simulate human brain function has already reduced speech recognition error rates by 25 percent, Ng said.


SOURCE  Gigaom

By 33rd Square

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