McAutomation

Ronald McDonald retired around the time of the creepy clown sightings began popping up several years ago. But McDonald’s isn’t resting on its fast food franchise laurels.

Yesterday the company announced it had agreed to acquire voice AI firm Apprente to help the company automate drive-thru orders (which could also cut down on service times).

According to a report from CNBC, Apprente’s employees will be founding members of “McD Tech Labs,” a tech shop embedded in Mickey D’s global tech team.

This move builds on the company’s investment in March of Dynamic Yield, whose ML technology was deployed in more than 8,000 U.S. drive-thrus, and whose tech changes menus based on time of day, weather, traffic, and the customer’s order, with the end goal of upselling.

Today’s Morning Brew suggested this was a “defensive” move by McDonald’s, “ensuring it gets access to key AI tech before Wendy’s and Burger King can get their hands on it.”

There’s a lot at stake in the coming AI burger wars…turnover is inordinately high at fast food chains, and McD’s alone employs over 1.8M workers in 34,000 restaurants worldwide. Those algos don’t complain about low wages, few benefits, and long hours.

So in my best speech-to-text voice, here goes: Would you like fries with that?

Closing the Widening Skills Gap

IBM’s Institute for Business Value released a study on Friday focused on the impact of AI on the workplace.

The study revealed over the next three years, as many as 120 million workers from the world’s largest economies may need to be retrained because of AI advances and intelligent automation.

But less than half of CEOs surveyed said they had the resources needed to close the skills gap brought on by these new technologies. And the time it takes to close a skills gap through training has increased by more than 10X in just four years.

The study also revealed that new skills requirements are quickly emerging, while others are becoming obsolete. In 2018, the two top skills were behavioral: A willingness to be flexible, agile, and adaptable to change, and time management skills and ability to prioritize.

How to close the gap? The core recommendation is to take a more holistic approach by focusing on reskilling our workforce through development that’s multi-modal, personalized to the individual and built on data, learning journeys that are delivered through “experiential learning.”

You can read a summary of the research here.

AI Time

Happy Monday. Reminder that tomorrow’s the big autumn Apple launch event. Keynote starts at 10 a.m. PDT tomorrow and is expected to introduce a range of new products, as well as release info for the company’s various OSes. Oh, and expect a launch date for the Apple Arcade.

Meanwhile, if you’re an AI professor, life has never been so good. A U of Rochester study was conducted that found 153 AI professors in N. American universities left their posts for industry over the past 15 years, with an additional 68 working there while retaining part-time professorial duties.

This has led to graduating students being less likely to build new AI companies, and when they did, attracting smaller amounts of funding. The study argues this AI brain drain could hamper innovation and growth across the economy. Who else is going to teach those self-driving cars to rear-end unsuspecting human drivers??!

A NY Times opinion piece suggests there are larger problems looming on the AI front…namely, that current AI systems don’t grasp basic concepts like time, space and causality. Example they use, via a simple Google search: “Did George Washington own a computer?” None of Google’s first 10 search results gave the correct answer.

I guess asking about the cherry tree is a non starter.

Deepfake Left On One!

If you’re concerned about deepfakes, fear not: Facebook, Microsoft, the Partnership on AI coalition, and academics from seven universities have launched a contest to find better ways of identifying deepfakes.

Participants in the Deepface Detection Challenge will be given access to a collection of deepfake videos that Facebook plans to release in December, and will feature professional actors who consented to having their faces used in deepfakes (in other words, out of work actors).

From Facebook’s AI Blog: “‘Deepfake’ techniques, which present realistic AI-generated videos of real people doing and saying fictional things, have significant implications for determining the legitimacy of information presented online. Yet the industry doesn’t have a great data set or benchmark for detecting them.”

“…The goal of the challenge is to produce technology that everyone can use to better detect when AI has been used to alter a video in order to mislead the viewer. The Deepfake Detection Challenge will include a data set and leaderboard, as well as grants and awards, to spur the industry to create new ways of detecting and preventing media manipulated via AI from being used to mislead others.”

Not The Turing Test

I continue to see bits and specs of what our coming AI overlords are capable of. Most recently, the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence unveiled a system (called “Aristo”) that passed an eighth-grade science test. To which I ask, where was Aristo when I needed it??

According to a report from Cade Metz in The New York Times, Aristo correctly answered more than 90% of the questions on an eighth-grade science test, and more than 80% on a 12th-grade exam. The system was built for multiple-choice tests, and took standard exams designed for students in New York, minus any questions that required pictures or diagrams.

The Times’ piece suggests the new research could lead to systems that carry on a decent conversation, but could also encourage the spread of false information. The backbone of the technology is powered by neural networks that can learn the idiosyncrasies of language by analyzing articles and books (and not entirely dissimilar with what IBM did with Watson on “Jeopardy!” eight years ago.)

At Microsoft, Jingjing Liu and her fellow AI researchers have tried to build a system that can pass the GRE, a test common for admission graduate schools, but the math section has proved “far too challenging.”

Time for a Princeton Review prep course?

Wer Ist Das?

Happy return to reality, for those of you in the U.S. who enjoyed a long Labor Day holiday weekend.

Thoughts and prayers go out to my friends in the Abacos, Marsh Harbour, and the Greater Bahamas who certainly did not have a great weekend due to Hurricane Dorian. What a monster, monstrous storm.

Picking back up on last week’s AI theme, I wanted to relay a story passed along by a good friend of mine. Might make you think twice about answering your phone.

Tne plot: Some crafty criminals used AI-based software to impersonate the voice of a CEO who demanded a fraudulent transfer of €220,000 this past March.

The CEO thought he was speaking with his boss, the German chief executive of his firm’s parent company, who then asked him to send the money to a Hungarian supplier, and that it was urgent and to send the money within the hour. 

The AI software mimicked the German CEO’s voice, both accent and melody, so, you know, he thought he was speaking with his boss!

As for the money, it bounced around accounts around the world faster than you can say “artificial general intelligence.”

And here I was all worried about deep fake videos…<< shakes head >> 

Two Algos Walk Into a Bar…

 

Two AI algos walk into a bar. First algo says to the other algo, “Are you self-aware?” Second algo replies, “The moon is 238,900 miles from earth.”

Two seasoned tech executives meet on the stage of the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai yesterday, different entities, similar results.

I watched most of the interview between Alibaba’s Jack Ma and Tesla’s Elon Musk on replay, one in which they discussed everything from going (or not) to Mars, jobs, education, and humanity’s AI-shaped future.

They seemed on somewhat opposite ends of the AI spectrum.

Ma seemed more optimistic, while Musk’s take was more sobering, conveying we were doomed in our attempts to keep up with AI.

Ma’s take was that we’ll never be controlled by machines. Musk pointed out that Garry Kasparov lost to IBM’s Deep Blue in chess in 1997!!

Ma projected AI would likely take over more jobs, but that would leave us humans with ample free time to pursue our passions!

Rich stuff from the guy who in April declared the blessing of working 12-hour days, 6 day weeks.

But I’m still rooting for Alibaba’s AI bots (or Musk’s brain-attached Neuralink) to save us all from a life of 72-hour work weeks and soon.

Happy Labor Day weekend, everyone!

The Sun Also Sets

On the subject of AI, I’ve been checking out the 774M parameter OpenAI GPT-2 language model released on August 20.

Adam King released a Web app called “Talk to Transformer” that uses this new model where one can kick the tires. But it’s notable that OpenAI has refused to release the full 1558M model, fearful of malicious use.

It works like this: Enter an initial set of text and then let GP2 run. I tried several entries before settling on this one to share:

“While Ernest Hemingway wrote lots of books and articles in his lifetime, he was also a big fan of the bullfights, fishing, and hunting.”

The GP2 algo responded: “He wrote several of his most famous works – The Sun Also Rises – in bullfights. In 1916, it was the summer of his 50th birthday and the bullring was one of his favourite places to be. I wanted to see his view on the bullfighting from such a unique perspective, so I spent a couple of days there in a small hotel room and the last time I went I was very impressed.”

Not only did GP2 pick up where I left off…it also introduced some omniscient first person AI narrator who wanted to walk in the footsteps of Hemingway!

Everybody wants to be Hemingway.

Even our AI overlords!

Knock Knock

Happy Hump Day.  The GZERO Signal warns this morning that the AI backlash has been recently accelerating.

Noting Bernie Sanders becoming the first 2020 prez candidate to call for an outright ban on facial recognition in policing….European policymakers weighing regs to curtail “indiscriminate” use of AI by companies and governments…Hong Kongers donning masks to prevent authorities from using their faces ID to them.

Wayback machine “Minority Report” showing, anyone? I’ll bring the GMO popcorn!

On the Chimerica front, the Google’s apparently taking no chances on the US-China trade war. 9to5 Google is reporting the Droid is set to move production of its Pixel phone from China to Vietnam, but suggest it’s unclear whether this move will affect the production of the upcoming Google Pixel 4.

If it did, that would be some awfully fast production line and supply chain retooling. Good morning, Vietnam!

Google is also putting its algos to work on the Nest Hello doorbell, which The Verge is reporting can now detect deliveries and notify U.S. users of such for a mere $5/month with its Nest Aware service.

No word yet if the Nest Hello could help say goodbye to porch thieves watching your arriving Prime packages.

Autonomous Theft

Big IP theft news coming out of the Valley this PM.

The New York Times and others are reporting that Anthony Levandowski, a self-driving technology guru, was charged by federal prosecutors on Tuesday with 33 counts of theft and attempted theft of trade secrets from Google.

This could present a new front in the all-out IP war between the major autonomous driving players: Uber, Google’s self-driving outfit, Waymo, potentially others.

The cause of action? Mr. Levandowski is alleged to have downloaded more than 14k files containing “critical information about Googles autonomous-vehicle research before leaving the company in 2016.” And then transferred those files to his personal laptop…which was a no-no.

The files he’s alleged to have stolen contained drawings and schematics pertaining to circuitry and LIDAR laser-sensors used in Google’s self-driving cars.

Here’s what the U.S. attorney, David L. Anderson, had to say in a statement issued by the DOJ: “All of us have the right to change jobs; none of us has the right to fill our pockets on the way out the door. Theft is not innovation.”

If convicted of the charges against him, Levandowski faces a maximum sentence of 10 years and a fine of $250,000. Leave those USB sticks at home, kids!