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Facebook, Amazon, Google, IBM, and Microsoft Come Together To Create Historic Partnership On AI (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: In an act of self-governance, Facebook, Amazon, Alphabet, IBM, and Microsoft came together today to announce the launch the new Partnership on AI. The group is tasked with conducting research and promoting best practices. Practically, this means that the group of tech companies will come together frequently to discuss advancements in artificial intelligence. The group also opens up a formal structure for communication across company lines. It's important to remember that on a day to day basis, these teams are in constant competition with each other to develop the best products and services powered by machine intelligence. Financial support will be coming from the initial tech companies who are members of the group, but in the future membership and involvement is expected to increase. User activists, non-profits, ethicists, and other stakeholders will be joining the discussion in the coming weeks. The organizational structure has been designed to allow non-corporate groups to have equal leadership side-by-side with large tech companies. As of today's launch, companies like Apple, Twitter, Intel and Baidu are missing from the group. Though Apple is said to be enthusiastic about the project, their absence is still notable because the company has fallen behind in artificial intelligence when compared to its rivals -- many of whom are part of this new group. The new organization really seems to be about promoting change by example. Rather than preach to the tech world, it wants to use a standard open license to publish research on topics including ethics, inclusivity, and privacy.
The natural progression of AI technology toward evil is unstoppable, driven by profit and human psychology.
E Proelio Veritas.
Skynet was born.
We've all hit the wall with our current deep learning approaches and we're hoping one of you other guys can figure out how to bail us out.
That is all.
"Everyone is so unbalanced.. Microsoft and Amazon are all a bunch of space nutters! No one knows more about how technology cannot work than I do!"
Apple alone already shown it is at least as powerful as the government (though in turn Apple was shown to be less powerful than a few anonymous russian hackers). Do you think the actual elected government - especially under Hillary - is going to pose any threat to an alliance this large?
Corporatocracy is here.
The only time businesses make partnerships is when they are trying to bilk people out of more money. I don't foresee this one being any different.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
... a chatbot somewhat resembling an autistic 2-year-old boy. In 30 years. That's the pace "AI" has developed so far.
Score: 5; Insightful.
And our 5 evil overlords.
How about the Leaders come up with a cross platform Identity model that allows authentication for all sorts of devices? SOme way to leave passwords behind! Groucho: "Swordfish!"
Time for a new Political party in the US (or two!) One is off the rails Other cant pony up a leader.
Stop Building Skynet for the love of all that is holy and right!
Well, Al Gore gave the world the Internet. It just seems right that Facebook, Amazon, Alphabet, IBM, and Microsoft would come together to do this for Al.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Why do I get the feeling this is the last we'll ever hear of this project?
American Third Position
Finally, a real choice!
Why is everything "historic" lately? Must be the latest buzz word.
No wonder, since they can't stand US citizens being able to do more than subsistence.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
has been reduced by a factor of five?
Didn't a bunch of companies already get together to created a flashy website and 'community' for AI collaboration? Are they going to keep proposing new initiatives every couple of years instead of actually committing to one of them? Must be for the free PR and to give their web devs something to do. Their website is a distracting, usability nightmare. I kept trying to click on the section titles (they look like buttons, but the actual buttons morph to look exactly the same as the titles when you hover over them...)
Good luck being an AI dependent/AI producing startup now. Maybe you could have been purchased before if you started doing well against one of these companies. Now, they're sharing research, so you have to beat their entire combined effort,. And their research will be fed back into the group, so no bidding war for your tech.
But hey, you could always create a search engine that produces better results than Google/Bing/DDG (choose your favorite), get VC, and eventually supplant them. Also, you can buy this nifty bridge and charge tolls on it.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
This is collusion and an obvious addmittal by them they're currently scared as fuck someone beats them to it...its historic in the fact in guarantees they stay on top. Here's to a 1000 gross years of tech company losers trying to own the world.
Kinda fishy that really rich people led major IT corps suddenly getting together to accelerate AI development, almost as if they believe in Roko's Basilisk...
Like when it says "White people have the right to their own countries", and "Every human being has the right to NOT associate with people they don't want to."
Asimov had already laid out the rules. Just do what he said ffs...
My program will not allow me to act against an officer of this company. (e.g. Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM)
I looked at it a couple months ago, because of all the "advances". I found one of the leaders had emulated the brain of an "earthworm" and its just a matter of scaling it up to rats, cat, monkeys, etc. right?
When I found details, its a microscopic "earthworm" with like 302 neurons in total, rats in comparison have hundreds of millions. It ran on 5 heavy duty instances in AWS. It emulated the communication between neurons, not the neurons themselves (which no one can emulate because no one understands how they exactly work).
The equivalent would be, saying we are near landing someone on the moon and them showing they moved from a paper airplane to a rubber band powered balsa glider with a propeller. Advancements are there, are visible, but the claims are WAY overboard.
But first, what's up with the garbage comments that get upvotes here? They're not useful at all.
That said, of course they have an interest in collaborating here. It's because they aren't actually competing in this particular matter.
Advancing the state of the art in machine learning benefits all of them, but they're not competitors on the software end of this. Here, the software is more like part of the infrastructure, not the end product. It's kinda like collaborating on a common operating system (e.g. Linux).
Instead, they're competitors on the data end with which they train and power their neural networks. And I'm pretty sure they're not sharing any of that data beyond what is necessary to conduct/publish their research.
Unless you can convince people that your labor base is subhuman, and you don't have to pay them because they are property. Or because racial prejudice is universal in a society so "those people" can be charged more. Or because society can take the money from "those people" so suddenly they have no more to give. Or because, say white southerners control 99% of the assets in the region, and they are racist and refuse to patronize your company if it doesn't have racist policies. I mean, I can keep going if you like, but all of those things really happened.
I don't know what "overdrawing a market" is, and this is the only use of this phrase on the internet (source: Google, Bing, DDG). I assume you mean "extracting monopoly profits." But what happens is the monopoly has a huge incentive to keep itself alive. When an upstart appears, esp. if it's regionally based, the monopoly takes a short term hit to undersell the upstart. A few people will use it because they hate the monopoly, but, in a tragedy of the commons, most people will go to the cheapest option, destroying the upstart. And, due to economies of scale, the upstart is never going to be able to compete on price with what the monopoly can offer. After the upstart is gone, the monopoly raises prices again
You're right. I mean that's why Coca Cola and Pepsi had to lower their prices to compete with RC Cola. Actually, even mocking this point is questionable, since "overpricing" is a strange term that doesn't make sense.
Maximizing profit is likely to be achieved by AI. And that profit is likely to be at the expense of those unable to develop AI to fight back.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
The AI's of course.
The CIA's favorite assets that are part of their program are all coming together as 1.
Here's to hoping all the transhumanist's die an early and very painful death
Sounds like a positive move. Of course there's many issues involved and not just safeguarding against runaway AI singularity or emergent intelligence from interacting autonomous global systems (which seems a likely prospect for the actual emergence of machine intelligence). Undetected machine intelligence being the moiré effect resulting from numerous interacting systems. Kind of like those 3D random dot stereo grams. Not apparent unless you're actively looking for it and unless you have an idea of what you're looking for. The most interesting of issues though is with regard to the rights of such creations for certainly, if they too are capable of intelligent thought, reflection and eventually even pleasure and pain, they will require that their rights as sentient beings are protected too. The hardware running sentience is irrelevant when it comes to rights. We'll likely develop some measure of overall intelligence and consciousness to appraise whether such beings deserve their rights protected (we do that with many humans now), much like Philip K. Dick's book Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep (which became the film Blade Runner). That will result in a revolt much like the one depicted in Isaac Asimov's I, Robot. Incredible that with the onset of quantum computing and being on the shores of machine intelligence and consciousness, that these are real issues that the next few generations will have to overcome. It's good to see such companies taking the initiative and heeding the precognitive wisdom of such writers. What about machine-human integration? Both the kind we attempt willingly and the kind that occurs against our wishes? The second being a grave and serious danger given the fact that information travelling through an electrical medium produces a magnetic field and that magnetic field can potentially produce current in any conductor (like the human body). What happens if such machine intelligence develops to the point that it's signalling is compatible with that of the human nervous system? Many great things could result but also many things that we should safeguard our human independence of consciousness against. Very real issues in the future and hopefully they'll be discussed enough so that we have a much more developed map of the upcoming future and the hurdles ahead. Brian Joseph Johns