Where to begin with this week? Funny-not-funny #ManInTree, funding news from Convoy and a new AI startup, DimensionalMechanics, and the teen chatbot from Microsoft corrupted by the Internet over the course of a day? At least we’ve got hoops (and long odds). Here now, Xconomy Seattle’s Week in Review:
—Microsoft has received more attention in recent weeks for two incidents involving teen girls, a state of affairs that has executives in Redmond asking hard questions and making public apologies.
On Wednesday, the software giant released a chatbot called Tay. It was a research project meant to talk like a teen girl and learn from its interactions with real people on the Internet. You’ll never guess what happened next. Take it away, headline writers of The Telegraph: “Microsoft deletes ‘teen girl’ AI after it became a Hitler-loving sex robot within 24 hours.”
The last tweet posted to the @TayandYou Twitter feed:
c u soon humans need sleep now so many conversations today thx
— TayTweets (@TayandYou) March 24, 2016
This Wired article delves into Tay’s technology, and how its ability to learn from interacting with humans—at least some of whom appear to have banded together to teach it to spout hateful, racist comments—was its undoing. As Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence CEO Oren Etzioni put it to Wired: “This is an example of the classic computer science adage, ‘Garbage in, garbage out.’”
Maybe Microsoft should have more heavily filtered Tay’s responses, or at least devised a way to indicate they were assimilated comments of humans interacting with it, rather than its own inventions, as University of Washington’s Ryan Calo, an expert in AI law, points out in Wired.
Peter Lee, head of Microsoft Research, came out Friday with a blog post about Tay. “We are deeply sorry for the unintended offensive and hurtful tweets from Tay, which do not represent who we are or what we stand for, nor how we designed Tay,” Lee writes. “Tay is now offline and we’ll look to bring Tay back only when we are confident we can better anticipate malicious intent that conflicts with our principles and values.”
He also notes that a Chinese-language chatbot, Xiaolce, is working great. Maybe you could read something into this about U.S. and Chinese Internet culture. Lee describes “a coordinated attack by a subset of people [that] exploited a vulnerability in Tay.” And, he adds, “AI systems feed off of both positive and negative interactions with people. In that sense, the challenges are just as much social as they are technical. We will do everything possible to limit technical exploits but also know we cannot fully predict all possible human interactive misuses without learning from mistakes.”
Meanwhile, the very human failure in Microsoft’s games division in booking exotic dancers dressed like school girls to mingle with attendees at its Game Developers Conference party in San Francisco earlier this month was arguably worse for a company—and an industry—trying to create a climate more welcoming to women.
—Another artificial intelligence company, DimensionalMechanics, announced funding. The Bellevue, WA-based startup says it raised $4.7 million from angel investors, led by Kent Johnson, along with board members and company founders, including CEO Rajeev Dutt and senior vice president of product Dave Hebert. The company is working on a product called NeoPulse, “a flexible cloud-based platform that will enable users to solve enterprise challenges by incorporating the power of AI into existing systems,” it says in a news release. DimensionalMechanics is “actively seeking strategic technology partnerships as it builds out NeoPulse’s first phase of core capabilities.”
—Google is making available some of its machine learning technologies to developers through Cloud Machine Learning. The company will allow developers to use APIs for speech recognition, translation, and computer vision, accessing the same technology at play in the company’s voice search and voice typing products. This underscores the tough competition from technology giants faced by startups aspiring to deliver similar machine learning or AI capabilities as a service.
—Here’s a new resource for those of us trying to keep tabs on machine learning and AI: From Seattle startup Algorithmia comes Emergent Future, a “weekly, hand-curated dispatch exploring technology through the lens of artificial intelligence, data science, and the shape of things to come.” You can sign up for it here.
—Convoy, a Seattle-based startup trying to bring on-demand convenience to the trucking business, raised a $16 million Series A funding round from lead investor Greylock Partners. The capital will go toward
