As technology progresses, so does humanity’s ingenuity. While a decade ago it would have been hard to imagine some of the technologies that already exist today, the same is the case for technologies that will appear ten years from now. However, we have made a huge step towards future technology, as Osaro’s learning AI gets $3.3 million funding.
- DeepMind, the system that inspired Osaro, was bought by Google for $400 million
- Derik Pridmore, Osaro’s co-founder, worked for one of the supporters, Peter Thiel, before approaching him for funding
- The creators of the software claim it’s 100 times faster than Google’s DeepMind
- Oren Etzioni, director of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, claims to be excited for the finished product
In the last quarter of 2013, DeepMind had a presentation in which they presented their AI which was capable of mastering a game like Pong, and even defeating the best human players in only a matter of hours. Google immediately purchased the company and is now developing the software from its London headquarters.
The technology is used by companies like Google, Microsoft and IBM to efficiently process and even organize enormous heaps of raw data, and even supporting their text, facial, and speech recognition, as well as their video classification software.
Well, Osaro promises the same efficiency, only with 100 times the speed. No wonder they got 3.3 million dollars very soon after announcing their plans.
Osaro will use deep reinforcement learning, a technique that requires a small input of data to be first introduced. Next, the artificial intelligence will repeat the task, whatever it is, over and over, by itself, until it reaches maximum efficiency. This means that the AI will not be only usable for programming devices, but that it can also reach behaviors that humans did not think of, thus also providing a suitable learning experience.
One of the first uses the AI will have will be to program assembly robots. It usually takes multiple weeks to program one of the machines, but with the new technology, the developers promise that such a robot will be fully programmable in under a week. And that is just the beginning.
The developer behind Osaro jokingly says that he can see a future in which you can show the program a machine, give it the required pieces, and it will be able to replicate it by itself.
The program is set to launch early in 2017, until then we can only wait and see what more will be divulged about this potentially groundbreaking technology.
Image source: Wikimedia
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