Kevin Kelly of Wired:
A few months ago I made the trek to the sylvan campus of the IBM research labs in Yorktown Heights, New York, to catch an early glimpse of the fast-arriving, long-overdue future of artificial intelligence. This was the home of Watson, the electronic genius that conquered Jeopardy! in 2011. The original Watson is still here—it's about the size of a bedroom, with 10 upright, refrigerator-shaped machines forming the four walls. The tiny interior cavity gives technicians access to the jumble of wires and cables on the machines' backs. It is surprisingly warm inside, as if the cluster were alive.
The sophisticated neural networks underlying systems like Google’s Deep Dream and all manner of interesting experiments require a great deal of computing power. NVIDIA proposes to put all that horsepower in a single box, specially engineered to meet the needs of AI researchers.
According to a new post published at the company’s website by CEO Richard Socher — a Stanford PhD who studied machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing and computer vision — Salesforce plans to use its technology to “further automate and personalize customer support, marketing automation, and many other business processes. [MetaMind will] extend Salesforce’s data science capabilities by embedding deep learning within the Salesforce platform.”
Maximum PC: Microsoft had good intentions when it unleashed "Tay," an AI chatbot designed to interact with the millennial crowd, to the Twitterverse. At the same time, Microsoft displayed an incredible amount of naivety in not predicting or preparing for what would happen next.
