A new job description spotted by 9to5Mac’s Jordan Kahn this morning suggests Apple wants to do something with Siri that makes the digital personal assistant a more fleshed out, relatable character. The posting is seeking someone with creative skills to help “evolve” Siri. Do you have what it takes to make Siri into the terrifying AI with an uncanny human semblance we all know it was meant to be? → Read More
Last month, famed inventor, entrepreneur and futurist, Ray Kurwzeil, announced that he was joining Google as a director of engineering. Many have wondered what Kurzweil’s new position would mean for Google and the billions of people its global reach directly or indirectly touches. Would they be uploading Kurzweil’s brain into their datacenters? Become the next Skynet?
Speaking at an event at… → Read More
Apple has filed a sizeable 51-page patent application continuation with the USPTO according to AppleInsider, which covers Siri in general terms, described broadly as an “Intelligent Automated Assistant.” The filing includes screenshots of Siri pre-Apple acquisition, and generally describes in detail the system however many hundreds of millions of iOS device users are already using. But it also… → Read More
Diffbot, the super-geeky/awesome visual learning robot technology which aims to “see” the web the way that people do, is today announcing a new infusion of capital. The company has closed $2 million in funding from a number of technology veterans, including EarthLink founder Sky Dayton; Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun Microsystems; Joi Ito, Director of MIT Media Lab; Brad Garlinghouse, CEO… → Read More
Personalized web search tool Trapit, often called the sister to Apple’s Siri because both were built on the same artificial intelligence project from DARPA and SRI, has just raised $6.2 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Horizons Ventures, the Hong Kong-based venture fund that manages the investments for Facebook and Spotify investor Li Ka-shing. Horizons also previously invested… → Read More
Diffbot is a geeky and incredibly interesting technology that uses bots, algorithms, computer vision and artificial intelligence to process the content on the Web the way a human being can. “The entire Internet can be broken down into 30 different page types” explains Co-founder Mike Tung, also known as “Diffbot Mike,” and “Diffbot can identify them all.” Diffbot knows the difference between a… → Read More
Like it or not, but the robots are coming, and they’re not messing around. I know this because I’ve seen an IBM-developed artificial intelligence (AI) named Watson defeat two human opponents (all-time great champions, no less) in a round of Jeopardy. Granted, it was merely an exhibition round—the actual robot versus human tournament airs in mid-February—but it portends something… → Read More
Devin posted the first AI Mario run last night and now there’s a longer – and better – one. This one even includes an exciting techno beat in the background which means someone out there dragged an MP3 into Movie Maker. → Read More
Raise your hand if you thought Microsoft’s press conference was a bit of a bore this morning? Aside from Natal, I wasn’t all that impressed by any of the upcoming titles (except for Conviction and maybe The Beatles Rock Band) or the updates to Xbox Live. Lionhead really stole the show when they unveiled a little AI boy named Milo. → Read More
On Monday, computer scientists at Stanford demonstrated their AI helicopter, sending it flying around campus all on its own. Instead of reveling in its new found freedom, the ‘copter performed aerobatics that it learned from watching a radio-controlled helicopter flown by a human. The AI system communicates with a ground-based computer that does the actual guiding. Each helicopter costs… → Read More
This is a short video by the NYU splinter of a DARPA-funded project that aims to improve the way robots perceive the world around them (and most importantly, in front of them). As the video notes, the resolution (both temporal and spatial) of current robots’ visual systems is very limited due to data bandwidth and CPU limitations. Consequently, it cannot process its path beyond about 12… → Read More
A potential market for AI in Second Life? Researchers at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have created at 4-year-old boy, Eddie, within Second Life. Eddie runs around and “has beliefs,” according to researchers. As Eddie operates entirely on formal logic and well-defined theorems, reasoning is not automatically fast, Bringsjord said, explaining the need for clever engineering and… → Read More
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