Real Intelligence

Artificial intelligence is the next big shift in digital enterprise, and tech majors have caught on early

By: The Financial Express | June 19, 2015 12:59 am

 

Twitter’s latest acquisition, Whetlab, is a start-up that is developing technologies that help companies implement machine-learning or artificial intelligence (AI) in their systems. Before this, the micro-blogging giant acquired MadBits, an image-search service that automatically understands, organises and extracts relevant information from raw media. In layman terms, the principle on which MadBits works—visual intelligence for programmes—is the same as the one that guides face recognition software in, say, a Facebook.

Twitter isn’t alone in its enthusiasm for machine-learning/AI. Google, Facebook et al are all either queued up at the doors of start-ups working on AI or are developing it in-house. While the game first changed for digital giants with the emergence of smartphones, that led them to either develop mobile-first platforms or acquire them for millions of dollars just to catch up (Facebook paid huge amounts for Instagram and WhatsApp), the shift towards AI is now happening. Google, last year, acquired the British AI start-up, DeepMind, even as Google Brain, a Google X project, is widely held to be the leading AI system—though Microsoft claims its Project Adam is better. With greater recognition of the shift, there will, of course, be more AI start-ups mushrooming and being acquired—all towards the end of relieving us of the pressure of thinking too hard.