Lifeboat Foundation

Tencent, Asia’s second highest valued tech firm, has bought a five percent share in Tesla. According to a filing, the Chinese firm scooped up 8,167,for around $1.7 billion to become one of Tesla’s largest shareholders.

The news itself sent Tesla’s share price up three percent in pre-market trading. The purchase was arranged on March 17, and those now-Tencent-owned shares are worth around $2.2 billion at current market value.

Tencent is a prolific investor. It holds equity in Snap, this year’s hot tech IPO, among others following an early investment. While that interest in messaging makes sense since Tencent’s operates China’s dominant chat app — WeChat — it isn’t immediately clear whether the Tesla investment has strategic undertones. An alliance with Tencent could significantly boost Tesla’s efforts in China, which is already impressive. Chinese sales accounted for 15 percent of Tesla’s $7 billion revenue last year.

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Intelligent Machines

Is artificial intelligence stuck in A rut?

The former director of Uber’s AI lab says the field is in danger of losing sight of its long-term goals.

Continue reading “Are we really making progress towards human-level artificial intelligence?” »

The Chinese search giant lost the star leader of its AI lab last week, but the technology remains an essential long-term focus.

• by.

  Yiting Sun

• March 30, 2017

For a mind to be capable of tackling anything, it has to have a memory.

Humans are exceptionally good at transferring old skills to new problems. Machines, despite all their recent wins against humans, aren’t. This is partly due to how they’re trained: artificial neural networks like Google’s DeepMind learn to master a singular task and call it quits. To learn a new task, it has to reset, wiping out previous memories and starting again from scratch.

This phenomenon, quite aptly dubbed “catastrophic forgetting,” condemns our AIs to be one-trick ponies.

Continue reading “Google Chases General Intelligence With New AI That Has a Memory” »

We will be able to embed storytelling directly into business strategy development, tell meaningful and memorable stories that truly connect with employees and customers, craft moments that are personalized and frictionless, and as a bonus, have the ability to harness Watson to optimize distribution across channel, demo and geography.

This is particularly resonant as I believe that just as the last twenty years mandated that every organization strive to be a technology company, the next twenty will command every winning corporation to be a content or media brand. In my view, Watson and AI will be the ingredient brand catalyzing tomorrow’s innovation at leading corporations in many ways; but media for certain will be top of the list, as AI assists them in becoming the top content studios of the future. Smaller businesses can scale these ideas using Watson as well as compelling content creation becomes an increasingly important driver of business strategy.

Tomorrow’s business success stories will be fueled by AI that extends beyond the CTO and areas of pure technology and infrastructure, to the CMO and areas ranging from culture to communication to creativity. The winning formula of the future as articulated by IBM will be creativity + technology = meaningful engagement, and the ability to activate purposeful change.

Continue reading “IBM Watson: The Ingredient Brand Helping Inform The Purposeful Business Of Tomorrow” »

DARPA envisions this development to come in three waves of innovation, culminating in machines capable of abstract thought.

ES Emerging Technology are delighted to invite you to the second event in our Exponential Series!

Nathan Waters is a futurist, decentralist and entrepreneur. He is the founder of the monthly Ethereum blockchain meetup (SydEthereum) and Australia’s largest independent hackathon (Hackagong).

In this discussion Nathan will be presenting a new project for a blockchain-based economic protocol intended to transition humanity to a post-Capitalist future. We’ll be covering topics such as: runaway automation, technological unemployment, future of work and education, wage slavery, wealth inequality, rising precariat, universal basic income, peer production, platform co-operatives, post-scarcity and decentralised autonomous organisations.

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Intelligent Machines

Apple’s AI director: here’s how to supercharge deep learning.

Ruslan Salakhutdinov, who leads Apple’s AI efforts, says emerging techniques could make the most popular approach in the field far more powerful.

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Could artificial intelligence make devices easier to use? According to Samsung, it sure can, and that’s what it the company out to prove with its Bixby AI service.

Bixby is being loaded on the Galaxy S8 and S8+ smartphones, which were announced on Tuesday. Bixby is an agent that can help the smartphones talk, recommend, and remind, said Mok Oh, vice president of service strategy at Samsung.

The AI service is being positioned as a more intuitive way to use and interact with smartphones. For example, Bixby can help smartphones execute tasks with a voice command. It also brings cool features like image recognition and language translation on board the S8 smartphones.

Continue reading “5 things the Samsung Galaxy S8’s Bixby artificial intelligence service will do” »