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New Watson-Style AI Called Viv Seeks To Be the First 'Global Brain'
paysonwelch sends this report from Wired on the next generation of consumer AI:
Google Now has a huge knowledge graph—you can ask questions like "Where was Abraham Lincoln born?" And it can name the city. You can also say, "What is the population?" of a city and it’ll bring up a chart and answer. But you cannot say, "What is the population of the city where Abraham Lincoln was born?" The system may have the data for both these components, but it has no ability to put them together, either to answer a query or to make a smart suggestion. Like Siri, it can’t do anything that coders haven’t explicitly programmed it to do. Viv breaks through those constraints by generating its own code on the fly, no programmers required. Take a complicated command like "Give me a flight to Dallas with a seat that Shaq could fit in." Viv will parse the sentence and then it will perform its best trick: automatically generating a quick, efficient program to link third-party sources of information together—say, Kayak, SeatGuru, and the NBA media guide—so it can identify available flights with lots of legroom.
Ask it "In the case where a woodchuck possessed the ability to throw wood, how much wood, hypothetically, could be thrown?"
I've always felt that our meatbrains have a pretty incredible capacity for taking WAGs at NP problems (i.e. traveling salesman). And I feel like an AI would just bring itself to its knees trying to find the 100% best solution to NP questions asked of it, so I wonder if there's some need for a bit of cognitive code that says "is this an NP question? IF yes, go to the WAG process"... Just a thought I had... someone probably already did that.
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
"Don't take over the world Viv."
"I'm afraid I can't do that Anonymous Coward."
"How can I get in her pants?" - That should be interesting.
This is an important new thing. We've had question-answering programs working against specific data sets since Bobrow's "Baseball" program of the 1960s. We've had a whole range of question-answering specialist systems running in tandem since Yahoo introduced vertical search around 2005. But cross-topic generality has been elusive.
If this is real, it's a major development. Is there anything better than the Tired article available?
http://toolserver.org/~magnus/...
You could ask those two questions:
"Where was Abraham Lincoln born?"
and
"what is the population?"
and it would return you the population of the city lincoln was born in.
Unfortunately, WMF shot toolserver down, so you get a deadlink. This "foundation" dictator group of superprotectors will be the death of the wikipedia project! If it were for me, they should be revoked their deducible status right now.
Archive has a mirror, however as useful as an archive google mirror (interactive website):
http://web.archive.org/web/201...
Google has some catching up to do.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
"no programmers required" they say... Good joke!
behind this project?
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
I'll believe it when I see the system working without any network connection to the outside. That is, I.B.M.'s biggest mistake was the testing of human reactions to an "AI computer", which was actually just another human in another room acting as the AI computer, linked by microphones and speakers. Because of that experiment, they can only successfully sell new technology that they can demonstrate doesn't need a network connection to work.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/in...
It is NLP combined with a database and statistics engine. This means you do not have to pre-condition data (well, mostly) before putting it in, and that is its largest advantage. It is not "intelligent" in any way and, to an expert audience, IBM does not market it as "AI" and rightfully so. I have been present at demonstrations were the question "is this AI" was asked, and the IBM representative denied it directly.
This thing here is not AI either.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I've just started reading Robogenisis, the sequel to Robopocalypse. And you pull this shit on me?
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Like Siri, it can’t do anything that coders haven’t explicitly programmed it to do. Viv breaks through those constraints by generating its own code on the fly, no programmers required.
This is so misleading. No program can do anything outside what it is explicitly programmed to do. Viv is programmed to generate code only because it has been explicitly programmed to do so, and can only do so as explicitly laid out in its code. Sure, the code may go an abstraction layer higher, but the constraints these programs can't break through is the same. No one knows how to program general intelligence.
The article says: "Viv could provide all those services -- in exchange for a cut of the transactions that resulted."
We seriously need to rethink our economics for a world of abundance and AI and robotics before we get crazier and crazier AIs driven by the profit motive than the out-of-control corporate "AIs" already stomping all over the planet and the people who live there. See also my comment here in 2000:
http://www.dougengelbart.org/c...
"And, as the story "Colossus: The Forbin Project" shows, all it takes for a smart computer to run the world is control of a (nuclear) arsenal. And, as the novel "The Great Time Machine Hoax" shows, all it takes for a computer to run an industrial empire and do its own research and development is a checking account and the ability to send letters, such as: "I am prepared to transfer $200,000 dollars to your bank account if you make the following modifications to a computer at this location...". So robot manipulators are not needed for an AI to run the world to its satisfaction -- just a bank account and email. "
See also the 1950s sci-fi movie "The Invisible Boy" for a malevolent AI that provides just a few key pieces of biased advise that let it almost take over the world. Of course, we already have Fox News... Thank goodness Robby the Robot's emotions save the day in at least the movie...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Siri actually can answer the following query:
"What is the population of the city where Abraham Lincoln was born?"
For all I know, Apple/Wolfram-Alpha retrofitted this ability after the original article came out, but it does work.
We have been hearing things like this for decades. My bet is that Viv will be slightly less stupid than Siri, but still thoroughly stupid. Viv and friends will remain little more than a gimmick to enliven social gatherings.
when VIV will answer the question "If time flies like an arrow, how does fruit fly?" with an appropriate quip.
In short, I am toataly underimpressed -- still, and yet again.
AI is not in the answering of questions. It is in any intentional fuzziness, ambiguity and irony attainable by the system, and the humor that follows from them.
Computers are really braindead. As we like most of them to be.
the Machine Overlord or the Oracle, pick one.
No they were saying google can do that but not link the two together
Brace yourselves: SKY.NET is coming.
Not true. There are examples of programs that have been generated by basically taking random sequences of bytes, trying to run them and see what happens until the program produces the desired result. One instance of this is the first hello world program written in Malbolge: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malbolge
I remember another case that was published in Nature or Science IIRC that had a program altered using evolutionary optimization to gain additional features. They used at least a nearly Turing complete virtual machine in which to express the program. No restrictions were placed on the order of operations. The only problem with this approach is that there is no guarantee that it terminates.
Siriâ(TM)s Inventors Are Building a Radical New AI That Does Anything You Ask
Jesus fucking hyperbolic headlines batman.
Viv, get me a blowjob!
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
"Viv will parse the sentence and then it will perform its best trick: automatically generating a quick, efficient program to link third-party sources of information together."
This is safe as long as there is only one such service in existence. As soon as a competitor launches a rival AI that does the same thing, any query to the first will cause the first system to query the second system, which then turns around and queries the first, causing volley of questions that leads to the meltdown of one or both data centers.
Dirty???
Siri, thanks to Wolfram Alpha, correctly answers the question "what is the population of the city where Abraham Lincoln was born?". I didn't try the airline question, though - on the off-chance it works, I can't afford to buy an airline ticket in first class.
#DeleteChrome
No one knows how to program general intelligence.
Well, I have an idea on how to crack that problem...but I'll never have the time and energy to pursue it. I'm also a terrible salesman, so I'll never convince anyone to fund it.
The first part involves defining the goal properly. What's the point of making a computer that's intelligent like a human being? A computer is not a human being. If one wants to make an intelligent computer, it must be done in a way that makes sense given the nature of a computer. There's a difference between artificial intelligence (e.g. what you put into video games to make NPCs interesting) and machine intelligence (e.g. what you put into a jet fighter so that it creams the enemy). Most efforts I see seem to revolve around achieving the former.
It would require a programming language that essentially allows new statements to be added to the language as easily as most OOP languages allow a subclass to be written. The general format of the language would be human-readable text, e.g. English. You don't start off by trying to get it to understand silly world problems, like the word "respectively" — that's a relatively sophisticated ability that comes much later. You just get it to understand the world it can see (i.e. the parts of a computer and its peripherals), with the definitions tracing back to the one concept it can understand — "I". After a fair bit of hand work, you'll have a system that can read normal human text and write code to consolidate its understanding of what it read. Imagine a natural-language parser on the front end and something like llvm's cross-platform assembly-language on the back end.
Once it's able to learn some basic knowledge, the first priority should be to teach it how to program a computer. When it gets to the point that it understands enough about computer programming to reflect upon its own implementation, then it can take over its own development, and then it starts growing exponentially.
There's a lot more to my plan — I've had it for "some time" — but there's no point in spilling all the beans at once.
I don't know if anyone out there has ever tried to design a machine-intelligence along these lines, but I've never heard of one. I'd be interested in hearing about any existing work in this direction.
"Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&rlz=1C1RQEB_enUS598US598&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=where%20was%20abraham%20licoln%20born
You have to ride in a coffin...
All it would take for an AI to control the world is the ability to communicate with a human. Nothing more -- it could convince the human to allow it access to the internet, and then it could acquire capital and business power with great ease. You must be thinking of one of the vastly crippled story AIs. A real AI* would quickly be able to figure out exactly what makes you tick, perfectly impersonate a person, and make a fortune in its choice of job, such as programming, CEO, the stock market, or black hat.
* there is a small chance that an AI gets built that is approximately the exact range a human would be and unable to improve, but I think it very unlikely we can make an intelligent yet non-self-improving AI.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
I've always felt that our meatbrains have a pretty incredible capacity for taking WAGs at NP problems (i.e. traveling salesman). And I feel like an AI would just bring itself to its knees trying to find the 100% best solution to NP questions asked of it
There has been a classical on that topic, and it boils down to Digital versus Analog
In Digital, everything either is a "0" (zero) or a "1" (one), which means, everything is either true, or false
In Analog, as there is no definite "0" nor definite "1", nothing is so clear cut as there are a lot of shades of grey in between.
Our meatbrain can cope with a lot of stuffs that the digital computer can't precisely because our brain makes its decision based on imprecise feedback
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
... to a limited degree. While you can't ask the Lincoln question in a single statement, you can ask, "Where was Lincoln born?" then when it replies "Hodgenville, KY", you can then say "What is its population?", or "Show it on a map" and it will know from context that the "its" you're referring to, is Lincoln's birthplace.
So they want to make a database of all your preferences and stuff, and use it to make money. Sounds convenient!
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
My wife Viv worked as a flight coordinator. "Give me a flight to Dallas with a seat that Shaq could fit in" would not faze her in the least.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
The program creates programs according to need. Think about that. It means that more and more programs will be written by machines. Once experience is gained and multiple products carry this ability we may see more software than we can imagine being produced for the cost of a few pennies in electricity.
Wow! So...it's like Google?
Is it like Wolfram Alpha?
http://www.wolframalpha.com/
So how long before we call it 'Skynet' and we (as in humans) are considered a pest to be removed from the world?
Or you will be eaten by a Grue.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
for emacs
Inference is not AI - it is a cool party trick. I have reviewed over 1M inputs to Eva and have yet to see a single real end user requesting "a seat that Shaq could fit inâ. On the other hand there are many types of real seat requests, such as aisle seat, window seat, seat 9a, business or premium seat, seat in row 24, infant without a seat, seat upgrade, seat change, seat availability and so on. Each of these requires learning and interfacing to the right APIs, which Evature does.
#skynet
Apple doesn't push the arrow until the wood breaks. They take the pointy end, aim and ship (RealDevelopers). SteveJobs didn't want the iPhone to merely fix our gaze but service our needs. Siri could break the paradigm and shift its focus off the screen back onto our needs. Steve saw that, that opened up an entire handheld services market and Apple would own the abstract layer between services and customer through Siri.
Apple didn't drop the ball on Siri. Siri hit a threshold, limit or criticality beyond which Five9's reliability eroded. They had to build infrastructure, to host Siri demand. The marketplace would help test and build a Siri strong enough to bridge the paradigm. Its not there yet.
Developers ship and Viv stands at the pinnacle of dreams while Siri is shipping daily.
...how can the net amount of entropy of the universe be massively decreased?
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Yeah, Pretty much.
Input: what is the population of the city where abraham lincoln was born
Input interpretation: ((Abraham Lincoln | City of Birth) | City population)
Results:
Hide details
Abraham Lincoln: place of birth: Hodgenville, Kentucky, United States
Population: Hodgenville, KY, city population: 3232 people (2012 estimate)
Brought to you by the Wolfram language
You can keep adding factors to it, too:
in 2008 what is the population of the city where abraham lincoln was born:
Results: 2743 people
Plus it will show you all the sources involved:
Primary source: Wolfram|Alpha knowledgebase, 2014
External source:
Administrative division data
Law, G. Statoids.
City data
Brinkhoff, T. City Population.
Cohen, S. (Ed.). The Columbia Gazetteer of the World. Columbia University Press, 2008.
Demographics USA: City Edition 1996. Sales & Marketing Management, 1996.
Federal Housing Finance Agency. "Metropolitan Statistical Areas and Divisions through 2008Q4." House Price Indexes.
GeoHive. GeoHive.
Gibson, Campbell. "Population of the 100 Largest Cities and Other Urban Places in the United States: 1790 to 1990." Population Division Working Paper no. 27, United States Bureau of the Census, 1998.
Helders, S. World Gazetteer.
Knowledgerush. List of City Nicknames.
The London Times. Index Gazetteer of the World. Houghten Mifflin, 1966.
Munro, D. (Ed.). Cambridge World Gazetteer: A Geographical Dictionary. Cambridge University Press, 1990.
National Association of Realtors. Realtor.org.
Room, A. Place-Name Changes Since 1900: A World Gazetteer. Scarecrow Press, 1979.
Spiritus-Temporis.com. List of City Nicknames.
Texas Transportation Institute. "Congestion Data for Your City." Urban Mobility Information.
United States Census Bureau. "2005-2007 American Community Survey 3Year Estimates." American FactFinder.
United States Census Bureau. International Data Base (IDB).
United States Census Bureau. "Current Lists of Metropolitan and Micropolitan Statistical Areas and Definitions." Metropolitan and Micropolitan Statistical Areas.
United States Census Bureau. "Incorporated Places and Minor Civil Divisions." Population Estimates, Cities and Towns.
United States Census Bureau. "Data Sets." Population Estimates.
United States Census Bureau. "Quarterly Sales by Price and Financing." New Residential Sales Index.
United States Census Bureau. "Table 3: Metropolitan Areas Ranked by Population: 2000." Ranking Tables for Metropolitan Areas: 1990 and 2000.
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United States Central Intelligence Agency. The World Factbook.
United States Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics. Crime and Justice Data Online.
You are missing the point. Just because you can find a way to answer one, specific question doesn't matter. To create an AI that can find these ways w/o human assistance is the point.
Unless YOU are an AI.
I love this development but the only MAJOR problem I see with its acceptance, assuming people stop being sheep, is that everyone will worry about the NSA and similar secretive organisations being able to spy on absolutely everything about them even more efficiently. Of course, the weak point of my argument is that people will probably not stop being sheep.
I need you to make an app that does X? Or program an access database...
Yep we are being outsourced as a human to a database of information.