AI Investment Hit an Inflection Point About 2020

Any way you look at it, private investment in artificial intelligence has blossomed. 

source: AI Index Report

AI Will Mostly be Encountered as a Feature of a Product, Not a Product as Such

Whether we encounter artificial intelligence as a user of apps, services or products, we increasingly will be using AI in the future. Very rarely, if ever, will we actually be buying “AI” as a product, though. It will simply be part of some other things we do buy. 

Which is to say we will normally encounter AI as “weak AI,”  some form of machine learning that is optimized for a particular purpose, such as speech recognition, search results, recommendations,  facial recognition or some customer service app. 

This form of AI will be wildly valuable and ubiquitous, early on. 

source: Toolbox 

What we will not often actually use or see is “strong AI” (“ deep AI”),  when machines apply their intelligence to solve complex problems. Still less are we at a stage when “artificial superintelligence” is possible, allowing machines to surpass human intelligence in terms of completing tasks. 

Weak AI will prove very useful as a way of detecting patterns in human or machine behavior that allow decisions to be made. When people use voice assistants such as Siri, they already are engaging in a process supported by weak AI. 

Almost no consumer or business user will ever buy “AI” in a direct sense, as a product. It will be a feature of a product. 

Verizon, Atos Partner on Computer Vision at the Edge

Verizon Business is adding the Atos computer vision to its multi-access edge computing fabric, aiming to support industrial internet of things applications that include the ability to do predictive analysis of industrial process disruptions. 

By 2025, by some estimates, computer vision will be the second-biggest use of artificial intelligence in the manufacturing industries. 

source: Fractovia 

The Atos computer vision platform will analyze 180 billion data points every hour. Using this system, the engineers and operators will be able to pinpoint exactly when and where operation downtime is predicted, up to 30 days in advance, the partners say. 

The Atos platform brings AI-powered video analytics to mission critical environments,  Verizon says. Verizon hopes the Atos BullSequana Edge servers, deployed in Verizon MEC facilities, will  strengthen its 5G edge offers and unlock new use cases. 

The solution is available to customers across a variety of industries including transport, industrials, logistics and manufacturing, Verizon says.  

The Atos Computer Vision Platform enables organizations to process and analyze massive amounts of complex video and image data in real-time to automatically monitor, manage and improve working practices, security and surveillance.

The Brain and Implications for AI

21st century artificial intelligence is dominated by deep learning. 

But one of the isues with deep learning is that it’s often completely data-driven. Prior knowledge is not incorporated. Adding prior knowlege reduces computation, but adds an element of judgment or subjectivity. 

And that will be an issue. We can go faster when we incorporate what we believe we already know. That's why we have "rules of thumb."

But humans process and perceive in ways that are not strictly based on "what exists in reality" but how we conclude things are in reality. We sometimes construct it, in other words. And humans are able to understand and sort through lots of abstractions we might just call "common sense."

Algorithms cannot do this unless they are taught. The "data" does not necessarily help. It's kind of how we had issues with machine vision. "Objects" humans easily recognized often were difficult for AI to perceive. We had to embed that knowledge in the algorithms. 

It all matters for applied AI since AI is about inferences. And inferences made by humans often involve all sorts of embedded rules that make inference generation easier and more accurate. 

AI is Becoming a Feature of Computing and Connectivity

Even when artificial intelligence is more a feature than a product, AI is intertwined with computing and connectivity these days. 

Digital Realty announced the official opening of its first data center in South Korea, said to be the first carrier-neutral facility in the country. Digital Seoul 1 (ICN10) is a multi-story facility spanning 22,000 square feet and is strategically located in the northwest region of Seoul within the Sangam Digital Media City, a newly developed urban planning zone populated with technology and media companies, serving as a hub to promote South Korea's digital economy, Digital Realty says.

With 12 megawatts of capacity, the new facility offers enterprises superior connectivity with direct access to all local exchange carriers in the Korean market as well as the global ecosystem of 4,000 participants in nearly 50 metros across 25 countries.

ICN10 is also a NVIDIA-certified colocation provider of choice in South Korea as part of the NVIDIA DGX-Ready Data Center program. The facility is designed to handle Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) workloads and analytics from NVIDIA.

AI in Mobile Radio Access Networks Gets Results, Firm Claims

Artificial intelligence will be applied to manage mobile radio access networks, it is safe to say. 

“A leading communications service provider in China achieved an 18 percent improvement in downlink throughput ratio using Capacity Turbo in a trial in Guangzhou run across a 1755 cell, 580 base station network,” says Capacity Turbo. “Capacity Turbo also enabled the same CSP to achieve an 81 percent improvement in downlink packet loss and a 22 percent improvement in uplink packet loss across the same network.”

“In another example, the CSP used Capacity Turbo to optimize VoLTE performance and achieved an 81 percent reduction in packet loss while reducing uplink packet loss by around 22 percent,” the company says.

A major CSP in Thailand was able to improve coverage as well as increase base station throughput by between 13 percent to 15 percent, the firm claims.

Also, a CSP in Spain experienced a 15 percent improvement in average user downlink throughput across an optimized 766 cell portion of its network.

OpenAI Gets More Investment

Microsoft-backed OpenAI, the artificial intelligence lab that competes with Alphabet’s DeepMind and Meta AI, says it has raised $250 million in new investment. Microsoft invested $1 billion in 2019 into OpenAI. 

As part of that deal Microsoft become the firm’s sold cloud computing supplier. 

“After our pre-friends-and-family round in 2016, our F&F round in 2017, our angel round in 2018, our pre-seed round in 2019, our seed round in 2020, and our seed extension in 2021, we’re delighted to share we’ve raised a Series A of $250 million,” says Sam Altman, OpenAI’s co-founder and CEO.

Some might say there is an artificial intelligence investing bubble. Others will argue the potential returns are so great the “over-investment” is a rational bet.