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New Watson-Style AI Called Viv Seeks To Be the First 'Global Brain'

Posted by Soulskill on from the siri-why-does-my-cat-throw-up-so-much? dept.

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.

10 of 161 comments (clear)

  1. How much? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Ask it "In the case where a woodchuck possessed the ability to throw wood, how much wood, hypothetically, could be thrown?"

    1. Re:How much? by MildlyTangy · · Score: 3, Funny

      Ask it "In the case where a woodchuck possessed the ability to throw wood, how much wood, hypothetically, could be thrown?"

      The answer would depend on how much the woodchuck enjoyed chucking wood. If the woodchuck enjoys chucking wood, then the woodchuck would chuck as much wood as a woodchuck could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood. If the woodchuck does not enjoy chucking wood, then the woodchuck would not chuck as much wood as a woodchuck could chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood. So the amount of wood is somewhere inbetween zero and the maximum amount of wood a woodchuck could chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood.

    2. Re:How much? by paiute · · Score: 4, Funny

      A European woodchuck or an African woodchuck?

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  2. Wolfram Alpha... by msauve · · Score: 4, Informative

    Google has some catching up to do.

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    1. Re:Wolfram Alpha... by easyTree · · Score: 3, Informative

      Google has some catching up to do.

      Yah...

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  3. So misleading. by v(*_*)vvvv · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:Unbiased advice by a corporate-owned AI? by MikeMo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You do understand the concept of "fiction", do you not? These movies and stories didn't "show" anything except for the author's creativity and the movie company's ability to smell a winner.

    Honestly, I am so tired of humanity confusing movies with realityl.

  5. Re:This is important by BitZtream · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Yea, its important ... because they've just realized they need to do multi-part/nested queries.

    Its not really impressive, its a 'no shit sherlock', and I'm blown away that google can't do this already.

    Watson can.

    The important part is that someone just realized they need to do one query, look at the type answer and then use that to generate a new query.

    Well, okay, its not really important or even new ... as I said, Watson can do it and has been able to for years.

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  6. Google Now Does Understand Context by Forthan+Red · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ... 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.

  7. Re:Digital versus Analog by Jeremi · · Score: 4, Insightful

    In Digital, everything either is a "0" (zero) or a "1" (one), which means, everything is either true, or false

    Take 32 of those bits and put them together, now you've got a floating point value that can represent "true" as 1.0, "false" as 0.0, and a few million shades of "maybe" in between those two extremes.

    If that's not analog-y enough for you, make it 64 bits and now you can have trillions of shades. And if that's still not enough, add more bits until you've got the resolution you're looking for.

    I don't see any significant distinction between analog and digital, since digital logic asymptotically approaches analog as you add bits, and with today's memory sizes there are plenty of bits to go around.

    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

    Or perhaps because it's running a radically different kind of algorithm that no human has ever understood or implemented on a digital computer.

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