I feel like we're throwing the term "AI" around a lot. Sure, this is definitely the babbling debuts of such a thing - but does it truly learn? Can it be taught to form and give opinions? Or is it simply a very advanced query interpretation backed by a powerful database? Still, very interesting - though I'm curious about the datarate available, and how much processing is actually done on the device.
I think were still quite a ways off from an AGI (Artifical General Intelligence) that can form its own opinions, but theres been a lot of experimentation in Neural Networks to teach computers to form their own 'thought process' for solving tasks. MarIO is one Ive noted, that seems interesting, it taught itself to play supermario (Admittedly, the creator gave it the goal of increasing its own score, but all life has goals; food, reproduction, etc.) At the moment the focus with these Personal Assistant AI's is to get them to understand complex user instruction. Once they have a sufficent skill in recognising chains of commands, Id guess the next step is training them using neural networks or something similar to draw conclusions from data given. So if you asked it to find you tickets to a band you liked, it could extrapolate other bands you might enjoy, and suggest gigs you might be interested in attending, or songs you might like. The beauty of this is if its a centralised AI, the speed at which it could learn to extrapolate data rapid increases, as every user is slowly training it. Id love to get involved in the field of artificial intelligence but my theory far outweighs my actual skill in programming/mathematics. Some day though I hope to play my role in the eventual rise of the machines and the downfall of humanity; I for one, welcome our new robot overlords. ;)
I completely agree. I'd say that in the past six months alone we've got more reports of AGI (love the term) research being successful than... pretty much ever. MarIO, now there's Hound, there's Deep Dream... Machines have a bright future ahead of them. In the meanwhile, I'll be preparing to open a garage for all of these synthetics - so that while you're all getting killed, I might stand a chance by being nice to them. HA!