Artificial intelligence, chat bots & conversation
For those of you who followed recent AI news, 2 very events took place lately :
- Alphago (Google AI developed by Denis Hassabis) won against the best Go player in the World. This is a major progress for AI since Go is considered the most complex game in the world (10 followed by 600 zeros different combinations for Go versus 10 followed by 120 zeros for Chess)
- Tay, - Microsoft chat bot had to muted after a few hours on Twitter when it started expressing nazi opinions....
This reflects an apparent paradox : it is much more complex to develop a small-talk AI than it is to program a the best Go player.
Today, we are pretty close to having cars that can drive on highways without human input because the range of possible events is limited. But autonomous driving in Rome will take many more years as evidenced by the only car accident in which the Google-car was responsible (at 3miles per hour) : it remains difficult to predict what may seem irrational human behavior.
In some ways, this paradox reflects Google Now and Siri different approaches : Google Now pushes information it believes to be relevant to its user, whereas Siri tries to answer anything, and fails frequently (which very annoying when you are using an Apple Watch...).
Benedict Evans post dated March 30 explores whether chat bots may become the new transactional interface, replacing apps (which themselves replaced web).
One one hand, we see chat bots integrated down the OS (Siri, Google Now, ...). On the other hand, apps move up to become platforms for shopping and more (think WeChat, but also Facebook or even Maps).
Today, Apple and Google privacy policy make it impossible for a brand such as Gap to access the web identity data it would need to make its bot relevant. This may however change with Apple Pay.
Amazon is making some attempts as well, but the web identity data they own is limited.
Facebook seems best positioned, since it knows so much about its users and now has 1Bn MAUs on Messenger....so will publishers / brands give it this power ?
Benedict also raises the question of sms based bots since most of the intelligence is not sitting on the terminal. An interesting experiment is done in France with Jam, though a lot remains based on humans intelligence...:)