The Economist (January 23)
“Today about a trillion chips are made a year, or 128 for every person on the planet.” With uses burgeoning in applications from EVs to AI, “demand will soar further,” especially as IoT connects machines and other things. In contrast, the industry is experiencing profound consolidation. As chip generations become more challenging and costly, “the number of manufacturers at the industry’s cutting-edge has fallen from over 25 in 2000 to three.” The “grueling 60-year struggle for supremacy is nearing its end.”
Tags: AI, Applications, Burgeoning, Challenging, Chips, Consolidation, Costly, Cutting edge, Demand, EVs, Generations, Grueling, IoT, Manufacturers, Struggle, Supremacy
Inc (September Issue)
SwanLeap has become “the fastest-growing private company in America.” Based in Madison, Wisconsin, the company “uses an artificial intelligence platform and custom software to help huge manufacturers, retailers, and other clients save money on shipping, and better manage their supply chains.” In 2013, SwanLeap’s first year revenues totaled $110,000. In 2017, the firm took in “just shy of $100 million, good for a nosebleed-inducing three-year growth rate of 75,660.8 percent.” In 2018, it’s aiming for $500 million.
Tags: AI, Fastest-growing, Growth rate, Manufacturers, Retailers, SCM, Shipping, SwanLeap, U.S., Wisconsin
Traders Magazine (August 14)
Despite the fear, “stock predicting AI will never take over the world,” markets are a level two chaos event (L2CE): they respond to predictions. There is “a feedback loop. The program would have to predict share prices based upon variables including the share price it has just predicted. In other words, the forecast given by a stock prediction bot can never be right, if the amount traded because of this prediction is great enough to make it wrong.”
Tags: AI, Bot, Chaos, Fear, Feedback loop, Markets, Share prices, Stock predicting, Variables, Wrong
Wall Street Journal (August 11)
Though “artificial intelligence has the potential to reinvent the world, from how businesses operate to the types of jobs people hold to the way wars are fought,” the struggles of IBM’s Watson “suggest that revolution remains some way off.” Currently, “no published research shows Watson improving patient outcomes” while “more than a dozen IBM partners and clients have halted or shrunk Watson’s oncology-related projects” because of its “limited impact on patients.” Often, “the tools didn’t add much value. In some cases, Watson wasn’t accurate.”
Tags: Accurate, AI, Clients, IBM, Impact, Oncology, Partners, Patient outcomes, Potential, Revolution, Struggles, Watson
Inc (July/August Issue)
“Artificially intelligent machines could streamline a company’s operations. Or, as the doom-and-gloomers say, one day they could supersede human founders.” The answer probably lies closer to the latter. “According to a recent article in the Washington University Law Review, algorithmic entities, or AEs, are nearly sophisticated enough to run a company–and have a particular comparative edge when it comes to ‘criminal enterprise.’”
Tags: AEs, AI, Criminal enterprise, Doom, Gloom, Human, Operations, Sophisticated, Streamline
The Economist (April 21)
“Humans have had a good run. But with the most recent breakthrough in robotics, it is clear that their time as masters of planet Earth has come to an end.” Such statements remain unlikely and “furniture-assembly helps explain why.” Researchers in Singapore were able to get two robots to assemble an Ikea flat pack, but it was a long, painstaking exercise. Robots and AI continue to struggle in the real world. “It seems to be a fundamental truth: physical dexterity is computationally harder than playing Go.”
Tags: AI, Breakthrough, Dexterity, Earth, Flat pack, Humans, Ikea, Real world, Robotics, Singapore
Newsweek (February 16)
“We’re on the cusp of a fourth industrial revolution. First came the steam trains, followed by electricity and after that, information technology—each transforming our working practices and automating jobs previously performed by humans. These days of course, it is robotics, artificial intelligence and machine learning driving the change.” Not only are these being employed to complete routine tasks, “but they are increasingly capable of accomplishing tasks requiring cognitive abilities.”
Tags: AI, Cognitive abilities, Electricity, Industrial Revolution, IT, Jobs, Machine learning, Robotics, Steam trains
Institutional Investor (November 13)
“AI will transform asset management,” but “the biggest challenge we face may not be developing powerful predictive AI-based investment models.” Rather, it will be “simply convincing investors not to trust their own judgment. More broadly, the winners and losers will be decided not by the current market position of a firm or even the size of its checkbook, but by its ability to overcome its anthropocentric prejudice and trust AI like it would trust a human being.”
Tags: AI, Anthropocentric, Asset management, Challenge, Investment models, Investors, Judgment, Powerful, Predictive, Trust
Gizmodo (October 19)
A “stunning AI breakthrough” has moved “us one step closer to the singularity.” Over the past year, the world marveled as AlphaGo has defeated Go masters at a game that has more possible combinations than the known universe has atoms. That now seems like child’s play. An improved version AlphaGo Zero (AGZ) took “just three days to train itself from scratch and acquire literally thousands of years of human Go knowledge simply by playing itself.” After three days of preparation, AGZ beat AlphaGo in each of 100 games. The technological singularity is “inching ever closer.”
Tags: AI, AlphaGo Zero, Breakthrough, Go, Knowledge, Singularity, Stunning
Fortune (August 12)
“As many in the United States and abroad are watching as tensions grow with North Korea, Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk issued a warning about artificial intelligence,” urging followers to keep their priorities straight. Musk pointed out that AI was riskier than North Korea and “also warned that artificial intelligence should be regulated the same way anything that could pose a danger to the public is.”
