Baidu tech chief: AI smart enough to take our jobs, not our lives. Yet

ISC (RotM) Artificial intelligence is about to transform society in the same way electricity did 100 years ago, but researchers are nowhere near producing the sort of self-aware sociopathic systems beloved of sci-fi writers. At least that's what Andrew Ng, Silicon Valley-based chief scientist at Chinese Web giant Baidu, when he kicked off the International Supercomputing Conference, by sketching the progress of neural networks, or deep learning platforms over the last decade. Ng said that in 2007, researchers were working on the CPU level, and were making networks with one million connections. As technology has progressed through the use of GPUs, and onto the cloud, and into the realms of HPC technology, networks were being constructed with 100 million connections. At the same time, he said, researchers were able to use much larger data sets. Whereas academic research projects on speech recognition had worked with data sets of 2000 hours of speech, Baidu's own speech recognition project was using 40,000 hours, he said, resulting in something close to a game-changing 99 per cent accuracy.