
Siri’s Inventors Are Building a New AI - cyphersanctus
http://www.wired.com/2014/08/viv/
======
hazz
From the article: "Google Now has a huge knowledge graph—you can ask questions
like ‘Where was Abraham Lincoln born?’ And it can name the city. You can also
say, ‘What is the population?’ of a city and it’ll bring up a chart and
answer. But you cannot say, ‘What is the population of the city where Abraham
Lincoln was born?’”

Out of interest I tried this question on WolframAlpha and it happily returned
the answer[0].

[0]
[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=What%20is%20the%20popul...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=What%20is%20the%20population%20of%20the%20city%20where%20Abraham%20Lincoln%20was%20born%3F)

~~~
natch
But, the answers are useless to me if they're returned as images. (And yeah,
I'm aware of OCR). I'm not saying the results are returned as images right
now, maybe they are, maybe they aren't, but Wolfram has pulled this stuff in
the past so my trust in the service is zero.

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jbarrow
I've said it before, but articles like this do more harm than good for the
field of AI research. Overhype has killed interest in the field numerous times
before, and if we're not careful it can do it again. Advice to reporters who
have an AI story: please don't hyperbolize both what the AI can do and how it
works. If AI companies over promise and under deliver enough times, interest
in an exciting field may die down again.

~~~
svantana
How is this overhype? If anything I feel it's a pretty mundane system they're
describing - some sentence parsing along with various database lookups. They
seem to stear pretty clear of AGI hardness.

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jamesbrownuhh
This is a lovely idea, but it seems less "AI" and more a kind of natural-
language SQL for diverse data sources.

Not that that's not pretty cool too. It's a surprise to me that even today,
for many of the best shopping websites, I can't search for furniture that fits
certain dimensions, chairs and settees that could be delivered through the
size of my door, etc. There's no app that can show me the closest retail store
to me which sells Widget X and has it in stock NOW.

Even the smartest property search websites can't show me houses for sale
within a minute's walk of a bus stop and three of a train station, in a
certain geographic area, where cable TV or fibre broadband is available and is
within walking distance of a nice fish and chip shop. All these data points
exist, but nobody yet seems to have identified the market opportunity in
linking them all together.

It's not as if the general public don't see TV shows like 24 and Criminal
Minds doing the whole "Chloe, show me all convicted felons within a 5 mile
radius released from jail in the last six weeks with a history of ordering
Chinese food on Tuesdays", after all. They must realise what happens when you
put data together, and how useful a technique it could be for answering even
everyday questions.

~~~
bweitzman
AI is a funny field. As soon as we understand something (read: build
something) that we think is AI, it's no longer AI, it's just the result of
some computation.

As humans, and more importantly in this context, things with "real"
intelligence, we don't like the thought of explaining away our consciousness
and experiences. I'm inclined to think that natural-language SQL for diverse
data sources wouldn't just be AI, it would be real intelligence, on the order
of what humans have, complete with qualia. See this excellent Radiolab
episode[0] where they discuss an experiment about the relationship between
thought and language.

On a side note, you should check out www.walkscore.com if you haven't already.
It's a great website for looking for houses (to buy and rent) that does some
of the things you mentioned.

[0]
[http://www.radiolab.org/story/91725-words/](http://www.radiolab.org/story/91725-words/)

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mrfusion
Offshoot comment: I'm not sure what that style of writing is called, but I
hate filtering through all the backstory, and human interest stuff to find out
what the technological advance is.

~~~
notduncansmith
A tool taught in Journalism 101 is the "inverted pyramid": the idea is to
structure your article so that the biggest details (5 W's) are at the top, and
move down the information gradient with the smaller details ("human interest
stuff") at the bottom. The writer may have skipped class that day.

~~~
dclowd9901
This is longform journalism, which doesn't follow that convention, and focuses
more on the "human" story.

This is likely more PR puff than actual news reporting. This company was
mentioned on NPR this morning as well. I'm guessing they're just making the
rounds and building interest.

~~~
notduncansmith
I don't know if I'd qualify this as "longform journalism", the article is
pretty small. I can see where the writer may have been going for that style,
but that requires a commitment to a certain minimum amount of content (and,
for readers, a certain amount of insight gleaned to make it worth the time
investment). Definitely a fluff piece, as you said.

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hedgew
To summarize: Viv is a smarter Siri, that could be implemented in various
devices and applications, in different contexts.

However, _“Viv is potentially very big, but it’s all still potential”_.

The article also, is nothing but hype.

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sytelus
Solving natural language query is at least as hard as asking the system to
write a program for an arbitrary goal. So if you can ever build a program that
can take an arbitrary goal and output the program source code then you can
also solve arbitrary natural language queries efficiently.

So most "supposedly" AI systems do brute force or probabilistic templating -
i.e. mapping the query to a known structure of sentences. Then you get
translation of these known structures of sentences to known machine level
structured queries. This is why systems like Siri would fail on its face as
soon as you ask even mildly "hard" question. For example, queries that starts
with "How many..." such as "How many teeth humans have?" are very easy to
solve and in fact it can be your weekend project for Wikipidea corpus with
impressive accuracy. But if you change this query to "What is the factorial of
the number of teeth that human have after subtracting number of legs octopus
has?" then you would get no where.

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viach
Interesting, if we consider building AI as a startup, what would be the answer
to standard investors question - what problem does it solve?

~~~
jbarrow
There have been a couple of companies that have tried this, mainly Numenta
(Jeff Hawkins) and now Vicarious (Dileep George). The latter it's had a
successful funding round, getting millions from big-name investors and
entrepreneurs.

The value proposition for both of them was creating biologically inspired AI,
and Numenta eventually came out with an anomaly detection program, Grok. I
think it was largely bankrolled by its founder (he was also the inventor of
the palm pilot), though I'm not entirely sure. The value proposition for
Vicarious is that it has a secretive, general-purpose AI (not to be confused
with Artificial General Intelligence, aka Strong AI), but save a few videos of
their program solving CAPTCHA's, nobody knows too much about their offerings
yet.

~~~
oxtopus
Numenta is very much alive. Grok is available in the form of an AMI on the AWS
EC2 marketplace, and if you're curious about how it all works under the hood,
NuPIC, the core implementation is free software, available at
[https://github.com/numenta/nupic](https://github.com/numenta/nupic)

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rphouser
When they say Siri is “partnered” with different companies, does that mean
that it can draw from and direct to the companies' services/menus/store
catalogs? Does that exclude smaller companies that are not yet able to afford
a partnership, thereby bypassing them when making recommendations to the user?

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coldcode
If anything could actually read your mind we'd all be in big trouble. If such
a technology is ever developed in secret life as we know it would be terrible.
Thankfully these types of headlines are pretty dumb.

~~~
Houshalter
That already exists: [http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2011/09/22/brain-
movies/](http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2011/09/22/brain-movies/)

But that has nothing to do with this, at all.

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emsy
Offtopic: I've never considered Siri to be intelligent, but more as a bot.
Google Now is better but still not what I'd consider remotely intelligent.

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anigbrowl
I can't wait for the virtual assistant that realizes something will be a waste
of my time and flags it as such.

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ckluis
Turning that infographic into reality would mean Google dominance on search
would wane.

~~~
pacala
Or Google could buy it. Or Google researchers could replicate it. Or Google
could actually make it work because they already have the infrastructure to
scrape, curate and query a humongous knowledge graph.

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richardwigley
This title could have been written by buzzfeed. I am interested in information
and not hype (unless of course it really does read your mind!).

~~~
CWuestefeld
Half the articles I now see on Facebook have headlines like "Somebody Did
Something... and You'll Be AMAZED at What Happened Next"

I now have a policy that prevents me from clicking on any such link, even if
it sounds appealing.

~~~
chestervonwinch
I thought at one point it would be fun to gather all the titles of this nature
I could to create a hype/buzz title generator maybe using a markov model or
something. No time though.

~~~
Houshalter
There's this:
[http://www.headlinesmasher.com/](http://www.headlinesmasher.com/)

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jgalt212
Given that ridiculous headline, I refuse to read the article on general
principle.

~~~
moron4hire
You didn't miss much.

------
leishulang
Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana; AI flies like a human
brain.

