Topic: AI
Netflix uses AI in its new codec to compress video scene by scene — Quartz (Mar 2, 2017)
This feels like a somewhat gratuitous use of AI here by Netflix – maybe this is technically AI, but it’s hard to see how it’s not just image analysis. But the broader point here is that this is an often overlooked aspect of Netflix’s differentiation: its technical capabilities in video delivery. Yes, its investments in original content and its massive and rapidly growing scale globally are huge advantages over the competition, but its content delivery networks, compression techniques, and a host of other technical capabilities are also key to making its user experience better. And this is another area where it often feels like it will take competitors a long time to catch up even if they ever decide that’s strategically important.
via Quartz
Samsung’s bill to take on Apple’s Siri topped $200 million – Axios (Mar 1, 2017)
The number in the headline refers to the acquisition price of Viv, a virtual assistant startup which Samsung bought a few months back and is expected to integrate into the Samsung S8 launching later this month. To put that number in context, it’s around the same amount Apple was reported to have paid to acquire Siri, and tiny in the context of Samsung’s overall business – it generated $180 billion in revenue last year, along with $25 billion in operating profit. So Samsung can far more easily afford this investment than, say, Xiaomi can afford its comparably-sized investment in in-house chip capability. But it’s still a decent chunk of money from Samsung in a year when it also announced the much larger Harman acquisition. Far more importantly, we haven’t yet seen what Viv will do when integrated into a Samsung phone, and whether it’ll be as good as the early hype around the standalone product suggested.
via Axios
Amazon Echo May Get Voice ID Feature – Time (Feb 28, 2017)
From the first time I heard about Google Home at I/O last year, I assumed it would have multi-user support, and yet it didn’t. Now it sounds like it’s Amazon that may bring this feature to its home speaker first, which is yet another example of how Google seems to be punching below its weight in this fight. Google is all about individual user accounts: email, calendar, to-do lists, YouTube subscriptions, Android device identities and lots more are all tied up in personal accounts. Amazon, by contrast, probably works mostly at the level of the household, with families sharing Prime shipping and video accounts. So it’s ironic that Amazon would be the first to market with something that provides individual identification by voice. At the same time, I think there are going to be severe limitations around voice identification that may well make it inappropriate for anything security related – voice recordings are much easier than fingerprint cloning, for example. And in both the household I grew up in and my own home now, there were several people with very similar voices – it will be very important for Amazon (and Google) to be able to tell apart even voices with shared genes.
via Time
Google’s digital assistant comes to new Android phones – Reuters (Feb 27, 2017)
This, to my mind, is one of the bigger announcements coming out of MWC – that Google will finally allow other smartphone makers to use the Google Assistant, after several months of keeping it exclusive to its own Pixel smartphone. I described that decision at the time as representing a big strategic shift for Google, and probably a mistake, and the evidence since has borne that out. The Pixel has sold in small numbers, Amazon’s Alexa has extended its lead considerably as the voice platform of choice for hardware makers, and even at MWC itself Android vendors announced Alexa integration despite Google’s shift here. The good news is that it’s only been a few months, but the bad news is that this change in policy will come too late to hit the new flagships debuting at MWC, including the new ones from both Samsung and LG. It will likely become available later, but shipping as an integrated part of these new smartphones would have been much better. I’m betting that Google will continue to pay for this strategic misstep for some time to come – even once it’s available, OEMs will want to offer more differentiation than the Google Assistant allows them, which will continue to make Alexa an appealing alternative.
via Reuters (more on Techmeme)
Google Cousin Develops Technology to Flag Toxic Online Comments – The New York Times (Feb 23, 2017)
I love the term “Google cousin” to describe the non-Google companies under the Alphabet umbrella (though confusingly Jigsaw’s website makes it seem as if it’s actually part of Google despite no longer being called Google Ideas). The bigger point here is that this is a clever use of machine learning to solve a real problem, which I’m always a big fan of. Online comments can be horrible and very time consuming to moderate, and this API can be used by publishers to filter out the most “toxic” of those moments. Having said that, the sample comments Jigsaw shows to demonstrate the tool highlight just how inane most online comments are regardless of whether they’re actually toxic, calling into question for me at least whether they’re worth having at all. But this Perspective tool seems to be part of a broader push around technologies for increasing “safety” in various scenarios – that’s definitely the message you get at the Jigsaw website.
Inside Facebook’s AI Machine – Backchannel (Feb 23, 2017)
Backchannel (and Steven Levy in particular) seems to be becoming the default outlet (I was going to say channel) for these access-y pieces on AI and machine learning. Levy previously did something very similar for Apple last August, Amazon in November, and Google in October. And there continues to be a perceived need for this kind of thing because AI continues to be something that’s mostly talked about rather than seen by consumers. That’s not to say that it’s not in products – it clearly is, and the money quote from this article is that “Facebook today cannot exist without AI” – but that it’s not intuitively obvious to consumers that AI is behind a lot of what they use. Companies still need to tell their AI stories, particularly because narratives have emerged about Google being ahead or Apple being behind, and those narratives need to be countered. There are several interesting things in this particular article, but as that quote indicates the biggest thing that comes out of it for me is how central AI and machine learning are becoming to almost everything at Facebook. Secondarily, it’s interesting to see Facebook in some cases do complex processing on the phone itself, something Apple has pioneered but which others have largely eschewed in favor of cloud processing.
via Backchannel
How Messenger and “M” Are Shifting Gears — The Information (Feb 22, 2017)
Facebook’s M assistant in its original conception was a virtual assistant a la Siri or Cortana which lived in Messenger, but one which was being trained by humans while it was available to a very limited number of users. Over time, it became clear that the process of handing off from humans to AI for the broad set of tasks M was supposed to be able to handle wasn’t going well, and it appears Facebooks somewhat went back to the drawing board on that. At the same time, the bot strategy within Messenger hasn’t gone well either, with limited developer and user adoption. Facebook now seems to have decided to combine these two failing projects into a new one which it presumably hopes will go better – M will pop up from time to time in Messenger conversions between friends to offer to complete certain tasks based on context. That’s probably a better, narrower use case for an AI assistant, but it also has serious potential to be creepy to users having what they will perceive to be a private conversation. And herein lies one of the biggest challenges with AI and bots – in order to be useful, they need to insert themselves into private conversations, which means they need to listen in on private conversations, much like Google’s advertising within Gmail has always been context based. In theory, only computers are eavesdropping, but that doesn’t stop people from objecting. I’m not convinced yet that this is the right answer either for Facebook’s M or bot strategies.
via The Information
Zuckerberg manifesto removes reference to Facebook monitoring ‘private channels’ – Business Insider (Feb 17, 2017)
Kudos to Mashable, which first noticed that one paragraph in a 6,000-word manifesto had been changed from the original to the final version (I covered the manifesto itself yesterday). And kudos, too, to Business Insider for following up with Facebook to find out why it was removed. The official explanation is that the paragraph talked too specifically about a capability Facebook hasn’t finalized yet, but it’s at least as likely that Facebook worried it would cause major privacy concerns. The paragraph in question talked about using AI to detect terrorists in private channels, which rather flies in the face of Facebook’s commitment to encryption and protecting privacy. As with much else in the letter, I think it was likely intended to be mostly aspirational rather than specific, but the original paragraph was rather tone deaf about how such an idea would be received even in such high-level terms.
via Business Insider
Inside Libratus, the Poker AI That Out-Bluffed the Best Humans – WIRED (Feb 2, 2017)
When most of your news about AI comes from the tech world, it’s easy to imagine that big tech companies are the only ones doing interesting things in the field, but here as in autonomous driving there’s also lots of amazing work being done in academia, as in this case. Carnegie Mellon researchers have developed a poker-playing AI which combines three different methods for learning the game and ultimately beating human players. The piece is worth reading for the details of how this was done, but it’s also a good reminder that neither any single tech company nor the tech industry as a whole has a monopoly on big breakthroughs in AI.
via Wired
Apple Officially Joins Partnership on AI (Jan 27, 2017)
I commented on the reports that Apple was about to join the Partnership on AI yesterday, so I won’t revisit all of this today. Two notable things from today’s announcement, though: Apple’s representative will be Tom Gruber, who runs Siri at Apple, and that may be indicative of where Apple sees ownership of AI residing within the company (it has no formal head of AI); secondly, Apple has been involved with the Partnership from the outset, but hadn’t formalized its membership until today. That might signify that there were some details of Apple’s membership which needed to be worked out before it felt comfortable joining -I’d love to know what those were. Separately from Apple’s involvement, it’s worth noting that the board now has representatives from a number of other organizations beyond tech companies including several universities. So the Partnership won’t just be about driving the agenda of the tech industry here.
Microsoft FY17 Q2 (December 2016 quarter) Earnings – Microsoft (Jan 26, 2017)
Cloud was the big theme on Microsoft’s earnings call once again, with a $14 billion annual run rate and nearly 50% gross margins across its cloud businesses, and a 95% growth rate in the Azure business alone. Surface revenue was down a bit, predictably because the product line wasn’t refreshed as fully as in previous years, but not by much, and it seems commercial sales actually grew (probably a reflection of the long sales cycles in enterprise). The phone business continues to dwindle to nothing (just over $200m in revenue this quarter by my estimate, down 81% year on year), but that’s so small now it barely impacts results. Windows did well overall, with some revenue growth from slightly stronger shipments in the PC market, though the PC market overall was still down overall last quarter. Monetizing its consumer business continues to be one of Microsoft’s biggest challenges – its Office consumer subscribers appear to be plateauing at around 25 million, most of its other consumer apps are offered free, and gaming is performing decently, though overall gaming revenue was down year on year. Overall, the results feed the narrative that Microsoft is undergoing a comeback, though it’s a slow and subtle one from a financial perspective.
You might also be interested in the Microsoft Q4 2016 deck which is part of the Jackdaw Research Quarterly Decks Service.
via Microsoft (more on Techmeme)
Apple Set to Join Amazon, Google, Facebook in AI Research Group – Bloomberg (Jan 26, 2017)
This would be a fascinating development – Apple has very rarely been part of such groups in the past, often a holdout among major tech companies. But it does seem to be taking AI very seriously at this point, and seems also to be taking steps to help current and potential employees feel they can continue to contribute in the industry beyond Apple’s walls, including allowing employees to publish research and potentially now joining this group. It’s also worth noting that AI, perhaps more than any other major technology currently being developed, has massive ethics implications, and ethics and related issues are a major focus of the group. Apple may feel that it needs to be both contributing to and learning from others in the field when it comes to these non-technical issues.
via Bloomberg (more on Techmeme)
Apple opens Siri to third-party developers on Apple Watch – Business Insider (Jan 24, 2017)
Apple opened up Siri access to certain categories of developers last year as part of iOS 10, but Siri on the Apple Watch has remained a first-party-only affair. That will change with iOS 10.3, which is rolling out to developers today and offers developers in a subset of four domains the ability to integrate their Apple Watch apps into Siri on the Watch. Apple’s focus in the last year or so has been about putting Siri on essentially every device it sells – a counter to Amazon Echo and Google Home’s single device approach – and making Siri smarter by allowing it to control more third party functionality, albeit in a much more tightly controlled way than Alexa’s Skills approach or even Google’s recent opening up of the Assistant with Actions on Google. These two fronts – third party integrations and the range of devices supported – will be critical as these various companies compete in the voice assistant space, and this small step is part of that much bigger picture.
via Business Insider
Alexa and Google Assistant have a problem: People aren’t sticking with voice apps they try – Recode (Jan 23, 2017)
Call this a rare bit of cold water poured on the hot topic of voice assistants and especially Amazon’s Alexa. The data here suggests that the third party “Skills” available through Alexa have essentially zero staying power, with most abandoned very quickly after the first use. I suspect that’s partly down to the awkward syntax you have to use to invoke Skills on Alexa, and partly down to the fact that most of the Skills are novelties at best, with many providing very little utility at all – the number of Skills available is one that Amazon likes to tout and reporters dutifully report, but is largely meaningless while this is the case. In addition, none of this really says anything about the usefulness or sticking power of the built-in functions, and that would be a great subject for a survey. I would guess that people stick with the core functions a lot more than these Skills, or return their devices because they’re not using them – the latter was my own eventual outcome when testing the Echo.
via Alexa and Google Assistant have a problem: People aren’t sticking with voice apps they try – Recode
Microsoft Veteran Will Help Run Chinese Search Giant Baidu – Bloomberg (Jan 17, 2017)
Qi Lu was very well respected at Microsoft and throughout the industry, and many were sad to see him step down from his role there due to health reasons a few months back. Now, he’s shown up at Baidu, the Chinese search engine, both to run much of the business but also apparently to spearhead a big push into AI. Given Google’s prominent role in pushing the boundaries of AI here in the US, it’s interesting to see its Chinese counterpart so far behind, and it makes sense that it wants to catch up. A single hire at the top (and one who will be very busy with other things) won’t get them there, but it can certainly demonstrate that Baidu is taking this initiative seriously, and help hire more of the best to assist in the work. The fact that he brings both significant US business and technology experience and Chinese nationality to bear on the role will also help bridge some of the gaps that might otherwise exist.
via Microsoft Veteran Will Help Run Chinese Search Giant Baidu – Bloomberg
Amazon pours resources into voice assistant Alexa – Financial Times (Jan 16, 2017)
There are some very interesting estimates in here from Evercore about the financials associated with Amazon’s Echo and Alexa effort. The firm estimates that Amazon lost around $330m on the project in 2016, and that it will lose $600m in 2017, due to a combination of selling hardware at a loss and giving away developer access for free, despite the high cost of developing the underlying service. This hasn’t been talked about nearly as much as the consumer sales angle, but it’s worth noting – Amazon is treating Echo and Alexa as a loss leader, not a moneymaking enterprise in its own right. This is therefore not about selling Echo devices per se, but about using Alexa and Echo as a means to another end (or several) – more retail sales, a powerful consumer platform that can be used for a variety of other things Amazon wants to push, and so on.
via Amazon pours resources into voice assistant Alexa – Financial Times
Amazon Echo vs. Google Home vs. Microsoft Cortana vs. Apple Siri – Business Insider (Jan 14, 2017)
We’re going to see a lot more of this kind of thing in the coming months, accelerated by Alexa’s amazing performance at CES this year. But as I’ve argued previously, Amazon is only “ahead” in voice if you look at the category very narrowly – Echo is one endpoint for Alexa, and really the only one Amazon has with any meaningful numbers behind it, while Siri, Google’s various assistants, and Cortana each have many more users by virtue of much larger installed bases of devices. Amazon is only ahead if you narrow the market to home-based voice speakers, though it definitely is there. The big question remains whether Amazon can get into devices that leave the home in meaningful numbers, and whether the experience will be any good on smaller devices like phones. Meanwhile, it continues to be much easier for the major competitors to add a home speaker to their device portfolios (as Google has already done) than for Amazon to get out of the home.
via Amazon Echo vs. Google Home vs. Microsoft Cortana vs. Apple Siri – Business Insider
Microsoft acquires deep learning startup Maluuba – The Official Microsoft Blog (Jan 13, 2017)
Maluuba looks like an interesting company – unlike so many other AI acquisitions from the last few years, this one doesn’t appear to have a product: it’s mostly a research company that’s done a variety of partnerships to apply its expertise to various thorny problems. As such, it’s a great fit for Microsoft, which is itself looking to apply AI and machine learning across its suite of products, and of course its Cortana assistant. Apple has made lots of AI acquisitions in recent years, but it’s been hard to fathom where exactly in the products and services launched since those acquisitions have paid off – perhaps most of them have yet to make it into consumer products. But you would hope the fruits of this acquisition would be more obvious at Microsoft in the coming years.
Google RAISR Intelligently Makes Low-Res Images High Quality – PCMag.com (Jan 13, 2017)
This is a great example of the practical benefits of machine learning, which is where the focus should be as companies tout their AI/ML credentials. On-stage demos of new capability at the research level are impressive but ultimately meaningless unless they lead to real-world benefits for end users such as this image processing technique which can reduce file sizes by 75%.
via Google RAISR Intelligently Makes Low-Res Images High Quality – PCMag.com
The demand for AI is helping Nvidia and AMD leapfrog Intel – The Verge (Jan 11, 2017)
This is a good summary of the way in which Intel is now being challenged not just in mobile by ARM architectures but in AI by Nvidia and AMD too. That means that Intel is now falling behind in the two most important new chip use cases, not just one, and that its big bets on IoT and wearables will likely end up looking marginal next to AI as the next big opportunity for chip vendors. Add in cars, where Nvidia is also doing very well, and suddenly things start to look pretty bleak for Intel. There’s a great deeper dive here on the WSJ too.
via The demand for AI is helping Nvidia and AMD leapfrog Intel – The Verge