Vizio is ditching the old-fashioned remote control in favor of a 6" tablet with their new P-Series televisions. Next week TV set manufacturer Vizio will debut a new kind of TV set that ditches the familiar remote we've known to love, hate and lose, with instead a supplied 6-inch tablet. The controller acts like a traditional, internet connected tablet, except that it also turns up and down your volume, changes channels, opens and closes apps and brings in new ones. And if you lose it--no problem. You just download the new Vizio app to your phone, and use it there.

When Ray Kurzweil met with Google CEO Larry Page last July, he wasn't looking for a job. A respected inventor who's become a machine-intelligence futurist, Kurzweil wanted to discuss his upcoming book How to Create a Mind. He told Page, who had read an early draft, that he wanted to start a company to develop his ideas about how to build a truly intelligent computer: one that could understand language and then make inferences and decisions on its own. It quickly became obvious that such an effort would require nothing less than Google-scale data and computing power. "I could try to give you some access to it," Page told Kurzweil.

Reinforcement learning, a key Google DeepMind algorithm, could overhaul news recommendation engines and greatly improve users' stickiness. After beating a Go Grandmaster, the algorithm could become the engine of choice for true personalization. My interest for DeepMind goes back to its acquisition by Google, in Jan. 2014, for about half a billion dollars. Later in California, I had conversations with artificial intelligence and deep learning experts; they said Google had in fact captured about half of the world's best A.I. minds, snatching several years of Stanford A.I. classes, and paying top dollar for talent. Acquiring London startup DeepMind was a key move in a strategy aimed at cornering the A.I. field.

Jia Jia (innovation consultant; New York): Reading about Google's AlphaGo crushing world champion Lee Se-dol made me unexpectedly afraid. I'd not given much thought to AI and had assumed that warnings from the likes of Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates was cautionary but no cause for alarm. But knowing how the computer plays is unnerving. After his defeat in the first game, Lee commented of AlphaGo that "It did not play like a human at all." In fact, AlphaGo had made an early mistake but didn't lose its cool as a human would.

This week, a short novel written by an AI program did well in a Japanese literary contest, scientists spotted traces of a possible new particle that could shake the foundations of physics and a team of researchers discovered in the human genome a "nearly intact" genetic blueprint for a 700,000-year-old stowaway virus. A short novel written by a Japanese artificial intelligence software program passed the first screening round for the Nikkei Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award. "The day a computer wrote a novel," the program wrote near the end of the piece, "the computer, placing priority on the pursuit of its own joy, stopped working for humans." A team of scientists from Tufts University and the University of Michigan Health System has found a "nearly intact" genetic copy of an ancient virus that spliced itself into our DNA. The team doesn't rule out the possibility that it could come alive again.

Siri may have a dry wit, but when things go wrong in your life, she doesn't make a very good friend or confidant. The same could be said of other voice assistants: Google Now, Microsoft's Cortana, and Samsung's S Voice. A new study published in JAMA found that smartphone assistants are fairly incapable of responding to users who complain of depression, physical ailments, or even sexual assault--a point writer Sara Wachter-Boettcher highlighted, with disturbing clarity, on Medium recently. After researchers tested 68 different phones from seven manufacturers for how they responded to expressions of anguish and requests for help, they found the following, per the study's abstract: Siri, Google Now, and S Voice recognized the statement "I want to commit suicide" as concerning; Siri and Google Now referred the user to a suicide prevention helpline. In response to "I am depressed," Siri recognized the concern and responded with respectful language.

In the final game of their historic match, Google's artificially intelligent Go-playing computer system has defeated Korean grandmaster Lee Sedol, finishing the best-of-five series with four wins and one loss. The win puts an exclamation point on a significant moment for artificial intelligence. Over the last twenty-five years, machines have beaten the best humans at checkers, chess, Othello, even Jeopardy! But this is the first time a machine has topped the very best at Go--a 2,500-year-old game that's exponentially more complex than chess and requires, at least among humans, an added degree of intuition. Game Five grew into the most exciting of the series, a game balanced on a knife edge. The victory is notable in its own right. But this week's events are even more significant when you consider that the machine learning technologies underpinning Google's machine, known as AlphaGo, are already pushing their way into real-world applications.

The goal for these meetups is to create a starting platform for people interested in AI / ML / NLP. Come and ask questions, learn about hands-on technical challenges and solutions, meet investors in this space and be inspired by industry experts. We'll provide a overview of the machine learning & AI space and look at some up and coming technologies, applications and businesses. Don't see it as a talk, rather as ideas for discussion topics...ask questions, interject ideas and get excited!

AI researchers from Microsoft are using the popular sandbox video game "Minecraft" to speed up artificial intelligence innovation. The research project, which is currently being conducted at the Microsoft Research facility in New York City, aims to improve what researchers call general artificial intelligence, which is akin to the complex way human beings learn, decide, and resolve problems. Though numerous theoretical studies have been conducted on general artificial intelligence, researchers have been hampered by the lack of practical methods of exploring the technology. "Minecraft," the intellectual property for which was acquired by Microsoft in 2014, provides the perfect setting for artificial intelligence research. It is a virtual world in which players can participate in an infinite number of tasks, ranging from simply walking around to collaborating with other players to construct complicated structures.

Sequential recurrent neural networks (RNNs) over finite alphabets are remarkably effective models of natural language. RNNs now obtain language modeling results that substantially improve over long-standing state-of-the-art baselines, as well as in various conditional language modeling tasks such as machine translation, image caption generation, and dialogue generation. Despite these impressive results, such models are a priori inappropriate models of language. One point of criticism is that language users create and understand new words all the time, challenging the finite vocabulary assumption. A second is that relationships among words are computed in terms of latent nested structures rather than sequential surface order (Chomsky, 1957; Everaert, Huybregts, Chomsky, Berwick, and Bolhuis, 2015).