Monthly Archives: February 2017

Founder and CEO of Netflix Reed Hastings smiles during a keynote at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, Monday, Feb. 27, 2017.(Photo: AP Photo/Manu Fernandez)

Twenty to fifty years from now, when youre starting to get into some serious AI, Reed Hastings isnt sure whether Netflix is going to be entertaining you or entertaining the artificially intelligent bots.

The Netflix founder and CEO opined on the future during an interview on stage at Mobile World Congress here.

Whats amazing about technology is its really hard to predict, he says. What we do is try to learn and adapt rather than try to commit to one particular view of whats going to happen. And if virtual reality takes off well adapt to that, if it becomes contact lenses that have amazing powers well adapt to that.

Hastings appearance at the mobile industrys signature trade shindig was largely focused on Netflix experiences globally. Last January, Netflix expanded to 130 countries and is now just about everywhere, with one big exception China. About half of Netflixs nearly 100 million streaming members are international.

MORE:

Robots will outnumber humans in 30 years, Softbank says

Nokia 3310 relaunched with classic game Snake

Amazon, Netflix elbow into Oscars with 4 wins

The company has been on a roll lately. In January, Netflix (NFLX) easily beat Wall Street earnings forecasts, boosted by international subscribers. The stock is trading at $143.41, not far off its 52-week high.

Hastings discussed the appeal behind the companys international push.

If youre a filmmaker in Spain or Italy youre excited about Netflix because it can give global reach for your film. Hastings said hes seen strong mobile usage throughout Africa, Middle East, Asia.

Indeed, Hastings doesnt think theres anything uniquely American about the Netflix viewer. I dont know if I would call it an American experience. Its on a mobile phone, its on a Samsung TV. Fundamentally, the Internet is the most global medium weve ever seen and were trying to continue to learn how to do things well on the Internet.

Hastings says Netflix is investing heavily around the world on network servers, and improving the connection. Five or ten years from now the quality of Netflix on all of your devices will be just incredible and we dont know exactly what that is. But we know that the Internet is allowing new experiences to get created.

Meantime, Netflix is offering more content with a distinctly international flavor.

Autoplay

Show Thumbnails

Show Captions

For example, a Spanish show called Cable Girls is a 1920s period-piece about the original women hired to work telephone switchboards in Madrid. The sci-fi series 3% is produced out of Brazil.

We want to give global producers a global audience to entertain, Hastings said.

Netflix spent the first couple of years delivering mostly Hollywood content. Now the company is developing relationships with producers in Turkey, Korea, Japan and elsewhere.

The most surprising thing has been the tastes of people around the world, Hastings says. The story of the Internet is connecting people everywhere, and the role that we play in it is around stories of all types.

And he believes binge viewing appeals everywhere. The original binge view was the novel that you stayed up late to read or read on the beach at your leisure.

The Internet has brought back binge viewing to human beings and its just a much better way than watching a show every week. And youre going to see most linear networks convert to binge viewing, and thats very exciting.

Whats unknown right now is whether the audience binge watching many decades from now will be mostly robot or human.

Email: ebaig@usatoday.com; Follow USA TODAY Personal Tech Columnist @edbaig on Twitter

Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/2lNCPuP

The rest is here:

Netflix CEO: Our future audience may be AI lifeforms - USA TODAY

Forbes

Amazon, Google, Salesforce And Leading Roboticists On The Golden Age Of AI Forbes The 11th annual MIT Tech Conference, a student-led event organized by the MIT Sloan Tech Club, had exponential technologies as its theme this year. Here's what I learned from the event's morning sessions which covered artificial intelligence ...

Visit link:

Amazon, Google, Salesforce And Leading Roboticists On The Golden Age Of AI - Forbes

Forbes

Ai Weiwei To Release 'Epic Film That Humanizes Global Refugee Crisis' Forbes For the past year, the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has been traveling to countries with large migrant and refugee populations -- 22 countries in all -- for a feature-length documentary titled Human Flow, which he has just announced will be released this ...

Here is the original post:

Ai Weiwei To Release 'Epic Film That Humanizes Global Refugee Crisis' - Forbes

Conversational AI is pushing deeper into enterprise with Workfit, a new startup promising to make conference call follow-ups and mid-meeting CRM updates as easy as playing a song or checking the weather on Google Home or Amazon Echo. Battery Ventures, Greycroft Partners, Salesforce Ventures and a number of angels joined together to finance a $5.5 million seed investment in the startup.

Workfits announcement is underscored by a general uptick in activity around conversational AI for enterprise. Amazons Alexa, perhaps the most enterprise-friendly of the popular conversational tools available today, boasts integrations with companies like Hipchat and Sisense for both team collaboration and data recall. Of course, the reality is that most meetings are not limited to a single conference room and even fewer have an Echo listening in.

Workfits assistant Evalistensin tobusiness meetings and lends managers a helping hand by highlighting important action items.Aside from just coordinating follow-ups, Eva will plug into your CRM du jour to allow for voice-driven updates. This means that you can update the status of a given sale and even pull or update data entries. Workfit integrates with major meeting hosting players like BlueJeans, WebEx and Zoom.

The Workfit platform

Other tools like the recently launched Chorus.ai and Cogitoarerespectively more squarely focused on using AI to boostsales and improvethe effectiveness of customer support. Though Chorus.ai will join conference calls with roughly the same mechanism as Workfit, and both will highlight key action items, Workfit has no problem playing anactive part inmeetings.

In lieu of fading to the background, the team behind Workfit wants enterprise users to lend the assistant a hand by explicitly calling out follow-ups. The workflow might sound unpolished, but the company argues that summarizing key points during a meeting is a best practice, regardless of the presence of an AI, to ensure all human participants are on the same page. Eva will do as much in the background as she can, but has no problem being recognized in the spirit of X.ais personal scheduling assistant Amy.

With consumer AI, if you play the wrong song thats ok, asserts Workfit CEOOmar Tawakol. But wrong info in a pipeline on Salesforce, thats not ok.

Workfit team left to right: Geish, David, Ahmad and Omar

This is the logic behind why the startup is focusing so heavily on Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), even bringing on Ahmad Abdulkader, a former leader within Facebooks applied AI group. Though working on ASR in 2017 isnt necessarily sexy, there are some gains to be made by building a system for a specific use case in this situation a lot of meeting language.

When asked about sales, the Workfit team told TechCrunch that they hadnt secured any sales yet and that they still considered it early days. Tawakols previous experience driving data management platform BlueKai to a $400 million Oracle acquisition in 2014 undoubtedly helped streamline the fundraising process. Battery Ventures was an early investor in BlueKai.

From here the team wants individual project managers to lead the charge in driving adoption. Once Workfit sees that a group of users is developing at a given company, it will jump in to try to close an enterprise sale.

Read more:

Workfit raises $5.5 million seed round to be your AI meeting ... - TechCrunch

Five Industries That Will Eliminate Legacy Issues Using AI Forbes AI just recently began making its way into the public consciousness, but over the next several years it will step in to transform entire industries. Key to this transformation is AI's unlimited capacity to process and analyze mass amounts of data, and ...

Continue reading here:

Five Industries That Will Eliminate Legacy Issues Using AI - Forbes

What does a billionaire eat when he can have anything? Cheeseburgers, apparently.

Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, and the richest man in the world according to Bloomberg, came back to Reddit today for his fifth AMA. He spoke at length about AI, polio, and politics.

But were still stuck on the cheeseburger thing.

The questions were a predictable mix of depth and frivolity. When asked if he ever used a disguise to go out incognito, Gates said he can get by with just a hat. Redditors joked that this puts him on the same level as most superheroes.

He believes the greatest problem facing the current generation is isolation:

I still wonder if digital tools can help people find opportunities to get together with others not Tinder but more like adults who want to mentor kids or hang out with each other. It is great that kids go off and pursue opportunities but when you get communities where the economy is weak and a lot of young people have left then something should be done to help.

Gates talked most about his desire for social and philanthropic reform. He spoke of the limits of what he can do to improve the world, even with all his money, and how he hopes to eliminate polio in his lifetime.

He was a little vague on certain issues, such as the state of America merely saying hes optimistic in the long run. When asked about the world refugee crisis, he said, The way to avoid refugee problems is to help countries develop by having good health, education and governance.

Also, in case anyone was wondering, he likes vacationing in Australia, and he believes a hot dog is only a sandwich if chopped up on a burger bun.

When asked where he sees himself in 15 years, he said, Hopefully a grandfather. Get on that, Bill Gates kids!

Im Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Ask Me Anything. on Reddit

Read next: Boston Dynamics' new robot can jump 4 ft, lift 100 lbs, and skate on 2 wheels

Original post:

Bill Gates took to Reddit to discuss cheeseburgers and AI - TNW

Forbes

HarperCollins Brings AI To Book Recommendations Forbes Publishers have always emphasized the power of word-of-mouth marketing when it comes to selling books. Booksellers are expected to hand-sell titles to bookstore patrons for this reason, and the shelves are often peppered with "employee recommendation" ...

See original here:

HarperCollins Brings AI To Book Recommendations - Forbes