Tag: Google

The Artificial Intelligence (AI) Challenge

I’ve been on the AI train for quite a while. Sounds like the next thing humans will do but you never know it may end up like the disappointment genetics ended up being despite the promises of 1990s.

Google AI recently spanked someone at the game of Go, considering that “someone” is one of the best humans at Go, that’s something.

Suddenly everyone is sitting up with many bandying around the belief that there would be Armageddon when machines take over the world. It won’t probably end that way but then who knows?

What I know is that AI has been quietly creeping into our daily lives without anyone even noticing. Your smartphones are chuck full of blistering AI technologies. When Siri is bantering about all sorts of rubbish, you think it’s your cousin?

For me the greatest challenge AI can face is being able to analyze video – recorded or live stream.

Before I go into more explanations, AI today can check a picture and identify items in it. Facebook can see a picture and identify all your friends in there. Scary enough? No, hear this: Facebook can identify you from pictures even when your face isn’t visible.

All I want is to have AI watch a video and tell me the plot of the story or watch a live camera feed and tell if something untold is happening. This is beyond facial or material identification, this is AI understanding plot!

At least I can spare myself the horrors of watching Batman V Superman and let the damn AI just tell me it ain’t worth visiting the cinema.

The strong also fail and it’s no big deal

Sometimes you just need to know when to call it quits. Does that make you a loser? Hell no! Or maybe. You can’t be sure until it’s all over.

The way it is, the most important thing is to win the war but you may lose some battles or side street skirmishes in the interest of overall success of your military or career campaign.

Some stories come to mind – Apple dropping Ping, a social network (I wonder if any of you know about it) like a bad habit when it wasn’t going north. Microsoft quarantined Nokia like a virus and took a $7.6B haircut while at it.

Recently, the folks at Google had a serious heart-to-heart talk with each other and decided that Google+ should go the way of the dodo. Starting weeks ago, Google+ is getting kicked out of Google assets, inclusive of YouTube were forcing users to have a Google+ accounts has drawn backlash.

Which comes to a critical question – how do you know when to throw in the towel and declare the current adventure dead or push through and succeed? The world is replete with anecdotes of people who succeeded despite odds stacked against them. Same world is also replete with anecdotes of those who didn’t pull back on time.

Sometimes life feels like a coin toss with two heads or two tails. The luck isn’t in the spin, it’s in the pick.