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Apple Set To Join Amazon, Google, Facebook in AI Research Group (bloomberg.com)
Apple will take a significant step toward disclosing more of its artificial intelligence research this week by becoming a member of a non-profit AI research consortium founded by five of the tech industry's biggest players, reports Bloomberg. Last September, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and IBM publicly announced The Partnership on AI, an organisation established "to study and formulate best practices, to advance the public's understanding of AI, and to serve as an open platform for discussion and engagement about AI and its influences on people and society." Apple released its first AI paper to the public last year.
So now Skynet will get Siri's voice and Terminators will have a thinner design?
At least when Skynet arises, it will be cross-platform.
We have been promised real AI any time now for forty years. What we have are the utterly stupid chatbots and the only somewhat less stupid digital assistants, which are good for party games, grins and giggles, and little more. Hopefully, this time things will be different - but I am not holding my breath.
In my experience, which is mostly much smaller organizations, is more like family game night competing than "family infighting, where siblings can be ruthless with each other". Many race car drivers and other sports competitors are friends - the fact that they are all members of small group, professional race drivers, means they have something important in common, which brings them together. yet what they have in common is that they compete with each other. :) How many people can really relate to Google Sundar Pichai, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella? Only a few people understand what it's like to be in that position, it's a small club of people who understand each other's daily experience.
Regarding "even face off against each other in court", going to court is dramatic for most individuals. It's been said that Alphabet (Google) gets sued about every 20 minutes. That might not be right, it might only be a few hundred times per year, but it's a normal thing, part of business operations. Two companies disagree, they let a judge decide the disagreement. Disagreements happen, courts resolve disagreements, there's often no animosity.
Because, believe it or not, cooperation generally is the better path to reaching your goal. If you're constantly fighting to the death, you're wasting resources fighting, If you're working together, those resources you spend don't have to be spent by the other people, and thus advancing the knowledge base.
This happens throughout nature - and even human history when we stopped fighting to survive and starting cooperating for our general survival.
Business is simply an optimization of this - work together on the basic goals and then fight over the small differences you'll inevitably encounter. E.g., Facebook and Google may feel to put their AI in the cloud, while Apple wants to protect user privacy, and put AI in the user's devices
Heck, until the 20th century, warfare was mostly collegial in nature - they'd fight during the day, then the enemies would congregate at the local pub and have their jollies together all night.
Strong AI is the ultimate goal of AI research, and has been impossibly hard to figure out. The company that figures it out first will have a huge advantage over the competitors. Everyone is making slow progress on strong AI and is deathly afraid one of their competitors will figure it out first. By joining up, they will guarantee themselves a piece of the pie no matter who figures it out. Think about it, if they were making good progress on strong AI, why join up? Would Google have collaborated with Yahoo on search technology in 2000?
Parent needs to be modded up insightful. Truly, if any of those companies were making headway they wouldn't give away the family jewels, hence none of them are having any success.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.