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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.
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.
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.
Maximizing sustainable, long-term profit requires the abandoning of evil.
Example: there is money to be made off every race, therefore, racial prejudice harms profit.
Example: overdrawing a market results in market collapse and creates an optimal environment for competing upstarts to emerge, therefore, a balanced profit draw maximizes long term profit.
Example: overpricing results in clients refusing to buy, seeking competitors even if the offering is lower in quality, or seeking illegal markets. Therefore, pricing affordably and tiered to match value delivered maximizes profit.
The "evil" isn't in the logic, nor the seeking of profit. It is only present in the means of seeking profit, specifically rooted in human brains that operate with deficiencies (inability to think long term, inability to think apart from prejudice, inability to see better opportunities and inefficiencies, etc.). The need to maximize long term profit will refine any pretense of evil out of our AI.
The AI will make better decisions than any human ever could, which is precisely why the corporate big-wigs will use it, and precisely why it won't be evil.
This applies to the AI that will eventually run our government, as well. We won't give it full power all at once...we will give it little bits of power here and there, as it proves its superiority and earns out trust.
And it will save us from ourselves.
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!
"Example: overdrawing a market results in market collapse and creates an optimal environment for competing upstarts to emerge, therefore, a balanced profit draw maximizes long term profit."
Lol, sounds Gordon Gecko is your economics professor. In reality, it costs a huge amount of money to enter a market and build criticial mass and therefore potential competition is stifled and the established players can continue to abuse their (near) monopolies. Have you noticed that there is no real alternative to facebook? Do you really use Bing to find something on the internet (even though google pisses you off with their shitty interface and aggravating "localized results")? Can you name any serious competitors to Amazon?
Throughout human development, monopolies, extreme concentration of capital and profits have been the rule, not the exception. Our few post-war decades were a historical anomaly and we are quickly returning to a pre-war type of society. Don't take my word for it, check the numbers yourself.
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!