Amazon, Facebook, Google, IBM, and Microsoft are banding together to advance AI

Oct 01, 2016, 00:07
Amazon, Facebook, Google, IBM, and Microsoft are banding together to advance AI

The industry group introduced a set of basic ethical standards for engineering development and scientific research that its five members have agreed upon.

Dubbed the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, it will include external experts.

All the companies now possess technology based on AI, some of which have already been showcased like Google's DeepMind, IBM's Watson API, Microsoft Face API and Amazon's Echo, which is heavily dependent on machine learning.

Google and four other technology giants have launched a nonprofit initiative to develop best practices in the field of artificial intelligence and to advance public understanding of AI technologies.

"We are focused on empowering both people and organizations, by democratizing access to intelligence to help solve our most pressing challenges", Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella said in a release. Each founding company has a representative on the board.

Each company will contribute funds and talent to the Partnership on AI, and they will jointly research issues such as ethics, privacy and safety that are essential for societal acceptance of the technology.

The participating companies will pool monetary and other resources such as human resources and data towards the cause. These misgivings about what an AI-dominated world would be like are not alleviated when the likes of Stephen Hawking warn that AI "could spell the end of the human race". There will be equal representation between corporate and non-corporate members, and it wants "academics, non-profits and specialists in policy and ethics" to join the group. Another 54% reported not believing they used AI even though the technology is a key component of digital assistants like Siri, and the overall Google experience where AI is part of improving Google Maps among many other of its products people use every day.

Subbarao Kambhampati, a computer science professor at Arizona State University and president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), said the coalition is timely and needed.

Notably absent from the group is Apple, which has been taking on its own AI efforts and has a long history of going at it alone, and OpenAI, the Elon Musk-backed research lab with aims which seem to complement those of PAI. However, Eric Horvitz, technical fellow and managing director at Microsoft Research, said, "We've been in discussions with Apple and they're enthusiastic about the effort".

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