GPTChat in Business Doing More or Less than Expected in Construction.

 Interesting example here.  Early experience yes. 

A case of GPTChat doing less than expected? 

 Causes?  Next?   Mostly positive, but the interviewer was completely skeptical.  Surprised theydid not disagree with using wheelbarrows.   These methods will not do physics but will manage the data and its relationships to many kinds of tasks and schedules. 

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Published April 26, 2023 5:00pm EDT

AI set to transform construction industry

Supply chain, building material software company DigiBuild using ChatGPT with spectacular results

By Breck Dumas FOXBusiness

FIRST ON FOX – Artificial intelligence has entered the construction industry, and early adopters say the efficiencies and cost-cutting measures will revolutionize the $10 trillion sector of the global economy for the better.

Supply chain and building material software company DigiBuild has been using OpenAI's ChatGPT to bolster its program for months, and is set to unveil the results at an event in Miami on Wednesday evening.

DigiBuild, a supply chain and building material software company, has been using ChatGPT for months.

But ahead of the announcement, DigiBuild CEO Robert Salvador gave FOX Business an exclusive sneak peek of how the powerful AI tool has improved efficiency and slashed costs for the firm's clients, and he says the technology will be "market changing."

The construction industry is still dogged by the high material costs and supply chain woes brought on by the pandemic, and DigiBuild's software aims to help developers and contractors save money and improve their schedules. The help of AI has provided a remarkable boost to that end.

To the company's knowledge, DigiBuild is the first to introduce ChatGPT into the construction supply chain, and the firm has some inside help. The building software firm is backed by major investors, including Y Combinator – which trained OpenAI CEO Sam Altman – and has an exclusive Slack channel with OpenAI that allows experts to build together.

Construction workers are shown with the Manhattan skyline and Empire State Building behind them in Brooklyn, New York City, on Jan. 24, 2023. (Ed Jones / AFP via Getty Images / Getty Images)

DigiBuild has been around five years and has automated the job of sifting through suppliers to find materials and working out scheduling. Now, what used to take a team of humans hundreds of labor hours using Excel spreadsheets, notebooks and manual phone calls has been reduced to a matter of seconds with the help of language learning models.

"ChatGPT has taken us to the next level," Salvador said. "Supersonic."

AI DATA LEAK CRISIS: NEW TOOL PREVENTS COMPANY SECRETS FROM BEING FED TO CHATGPT

"Instead of spending multiple hours probably getting a hold of maybe five or six suppliers, ChatGPT can find 100 of them and even automate outreach and begin communications with those 100 suppliers and say, 'Hey, we're DigiBuild. We need to find this type of door, can you provide a quote and send it back here?'" he said. "We can talk to 100 suppliers in one minute versus maybe a handful in a couple hours."

DigiBuild CEO Robert Salvador says ChatGPT has taken the company "supersonic."

The CEO offered a real-world example of a job where material costs were literally slashed by more than half using the new technology.

One of DigiBuild's clients, VCC Construction, needed closet shelving for a project in Virginia, and the builder could only find one quote for $150,000 with limited availability. With the click of a button, DigiBuild was able to find a vendor in the Midwest that provided the shelving and delivered it within weeks for $70,000.

Salvador says to imagine those results for a $500 million job or across the industry. He expects AI technology to become widely adopted.

"Before companies like us, the construction industry was still early in its digital transformation – they were late to the party," he told FOX Business. But now, "It's very much going all in on that, finally."

AI as Co-Pilot

More on Microsoft's plans to use emerging AI chat capabilities.  Further updates

ACM NEWS

AI as Co-Pilot: Your Online Life Is About to Change, Like It or Not  By CNet, February 8, 2023

In the half-century since Star Trek premiered, a lot of the far-future tech imagined for the show has found its way into our lives here, in the present. Communicators inspired our flip phones, then the tricorder turned into our modern-day smartphones. People now video chat with each other across the globe. Tech is even helping people regain a form of sight and hearing.

On Tuesday, Microsoft and artificial intelligence lab OpenAI began the race to conquer another sci-fi promise: a conversational computer that communicates like a human even if it doesn't exactly think for itself. 

Microsoft describes it as an "AI-powered co-pilot."

By infusing Microsoft's Bing search engine with OpenAI's ChatGPT programming smarts, the two companies said, we'll soon be able to ask for help planning a dinner party, drafting an email apologizing for being late or comparing financial reports from various companies. Microsoft said it'll bring the technology to its Edge browser and Office productivity apps too.

From CNet

View Full article   

On Augmenting Intelligence with AI

 Interesting piece.  How do you fit in  ' AI' components into an intelligent assistant framework?  Do we have the needed pieces?  What else need to be built and enhanced.

AlphaFold, GPT-3 and How to Augment Intelligence with AI

By Niko Grupen  in A16z  Andreeseen

This is the first post in a two-part series. Read Part 2 here. 

Around the same time that Alan Turing was shaping his theories of machine intelligence in Manchester, another future giant of the computing world, Douglas Engelbart, was developing an alternative computing paradigm over 5,000 miles away in the Bay Area. 

Engelbart believed that computers, with their ability to synthesize and manipulate vast quantities of information, should help humans solve problems, rather than remove them from the problem-solving loop. This ideology is now known as augmented intelligence. Engelbart’s contributions to the field (both as a PhD student at UC Berkeley and at SRI in the decades after) were perhaps best exemplified through “The Mother of All Demos” in 1968, where he unveiled for the first time many of the computing features we now take for granted — the mouse, GUIs, hyperlinks, word processing, version control, and even video conferencing — in a single demonstration.

Although it’s enticing to think about artificial intelligence passing human equivalency tests like Turing’s Imitation Game (or maybe something more sophisticated for today’s generalist AI models), we really should be thinking about how Engelbart’s ideas translate to our modern AI era. Put another way, how do we build the next Mother of All Demos?

In reality, the next mother of all demos will be much more than just a demonstration. We already have the ingredients — a whole new set of AI tools — so now we need to think about how these ingredients can help us reimagine and redesign our existing workflows and user experiences. In doing so, we can usher in a new class of AI-native experiences for search, scientific research, game design, and more.

The Mother of All Demos in the age of deep learning

If we’re building a version of the Mother of All Demos in the deep learning era, we could begin with these models and tools. Although research labs release new models seemingly every week, these are a great starting point to begin rethinking how we interact with technology:

GPT-3

The latest in OpenAI’s GPT series, GPT-3 is a 175-billion parameter language model that is trained on practically all of the text that exists on the Internet. Once trained, GPT-3 can generate coherent text for any topic (even in the style of particular writers or authors), summarize passages of text, and translate text into different languages. OpenAI also recently released a follow-up, InstructGPT, that incorporates human feedback to reduce harmful or biased outputs.

Copilot

Github’s Copilot takes “translating text into different languages” to the programming world. Built on top of OpenAI’s Codex — think GPT-3, but trained on words and code — Copilot is an “AI pair programmer” that will generate anything from individual lines to whole functions of code, based on a docstring describing what the code is supposed to do. Recently, DeepMind released a competing code-writing model, AlphaCode, that solves coding challenges from popular programming competitions.  .... ' 

Will AI Reason like Humans?

 IBM Still thinking Watson as assistant and more.

Tomorrow’s AI Will Reason Like Humans, IBM Watson Developer Predicts David Nahamoo says machines will grok us. 

When David Nahamoo was a high school student in Iran, he wanted to pursue a career in mathematics or physics. But after talking over career options with his friends, he says, he was "pointed in the direction of a good career in Iran" and instead decided to become an electrical engineer. Today the IEEE Life Fellow is CTO of Pryon, a startup in Raleigh, N.C., that is developing a natural-language-processing AI system for businesses. The company's programs aim to make companies more productive, reducing costs and eliminating inefficiencies.

DAVID NAHAMOO

Nahamoo is an expert in speech and language technologies. He spent almost 35 years at IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., developing innovative AI technologies such as Watson. The supercomputer won a game on Jeopardy! in 2011 against two of the U.S. TV show's most successful contestants. Watson answers questions using advanced natural language processing, information retrieval, knowledge representation, automated reasoning, and machine learning technologies.

"I love taking a problem, sitting down, and figuring out how I can solve it," Nahamoo says. "And when I do [solve the problem], I get a rush of joy." ... 

Nahamoo says the Watson project was all about making progress on programming machines with the cognitive abilities of humans. The supercomputer was the first step to creating an AI machine that people could interact with as if they were speaking to another person, he says.

One day, he says, AI machines will be able to understand physical cues such as head nodding and posture changes, as well as mimic human emotions. That would enable machines to interact more closely and could let them form connections with humans, he says.

Building such a machine, Nahamoo says, is "my interest, my love."

SWITCHING GEARS

Nahamoo now has an opportunity to take his work forward. In 2018 Igor Jablokov, founder and CEO of Pryon, offered Nahamoo the CTO position. The two had worked together at IBM in the early 2000s, when Jablokov led the development of IBM Watson Assistant—a forerunner to IBM Watson. The two collaborated again in the late 2000s, when Jablokov, founder and CEO of tech company Yap, licensed IBM's Attila speech-recognition engine. ....

Pryon has about 30 employees and aims to help companies use AI to improve their operations. One of its products, Answer, is a question-answering platform that companies can add to their AI assistants, chatbots, and help desks.

An employee can ask via text or voice how many vacation days she has available, for example. The platform organizes, reads, and searches a company's applications and documents to find the answer. Unlike other AI assistants and chatbots that can respond only to a limited set of requests, Pryon attempts to retrieve responses to any company-related questions. The system also collects user feedback and monitors usage in order to improve the quality of the answers.

"We are trying to build the best question-answering system out there," Nahamoo says. "One that can filter content from different kinds of files—from PDFs, HTML, and Microsoft Word or Google documents o PowerPoint presentations."

The company has one customer using Answers and others that are interested in implementing the system, he says.  ... ' 

Thinking Assistive Disaster AI

A clear example of the interactions of sensors, logic, decisions and leveraging experience.  Some general ideas of the possibilities.

Assistive AI in Decreasing Natural Disaster Damage

Assistive AI is an invaluable tool to minimize the damages of natural disasters.  By Jack Williams  in SmartDataCollective

 A few years ago, we talked about the benefits of using AI and big data in disaster relief. We have recently seen how important these applications are, as the damage of natural disasters is worse than ever.

Mother Nature has been busier than ever this year, with natural disasters adding to the stress of the COVID-19 pandemic. A number of hurricanes have wreaked havoc on the Gulf Coast, and wildfires recently devastated the West Coast. Unfortunately, these severe weather events now occur more frequently. In seven of the last 10 years, there have been 10 or more weather-related disasters with costs exceeding $1 billion each. Among the 115 costly catastrophes since 2010 were so-called “1,000-year floods,” Category 5 hurricanes, and the most massive wildfires in history.

These problems put the importance of big data and AI to the test, as we strive to fight the problems they cause.

Worsening Disasters Highlight the Need for New Assistive AI Solutions

The problem is that, despite their calamitous effects, many natural disasters can be surprisingly difficult to spot in their beginning stages. For example, the 2018 Camp Fire in California that tore through large portions of the state, eventually burning over 150,000 acres and destroying more than 18,000 structures, began in the blink of an eye; it spread over the first seven miles in less than 90 minutes.  ... " 

Do Robots Make us Happier?

Not sure they are meant to.   Do calculators make us happier?  Computers? The Internet?   No they just give us the option for some assistive benefit ...  which includes happiness.     Like exploring the idea of happiness given to us by robots.   The exploration is good. 

Robots Save Us Time — But Do They Make Us Happier?  by Ashley Whillans , Emanuel de Bellis , Fabian Nindl and Tobias Schlager in HBR

HBR Staff/Duet Postscriptum/Stocksy/Nednapa Chumjumpa/Getty Images

As of 2019, more than 14 million Americans owned a robotic vacuum cleaner. Robotic lawn mowers tend to our yards, robotic suitcases follow us through the airport, and smart cooking machines prepare ingredients and implement entire recipes. Some autonomous products even play with and clean up after our pets. These tools are meant to improve people’s lives, relieving them of chores and making them happier as a result — and while some do this, other’s don’t. How can business leaders ensure that their companies are developing products that people actually feel good about using?

As consumer psychologists, we have accumulated a great deal of evidence that spending money to outsource disliked tasks — such as by paying for a housecleaner — can improve happiness, lower stress, and improve our romantic relationships (even during the pandemic). But as technology develops, we have begun outsourcing not only to humans, but to machines as well.  ... "

Europeans Would Consider Augmentation

Depends on what you mean by augmentation,   we already pay for lots of it already.   Health vs intelligence, vs requested assistance?    Inevitable if properly demonstrated.

Majority of Europeans Would Consider Human Augmentation, Study Finds
The Next Web
Thomas Macaulay

A survey of more than 14,000 people in 16 countries by cybersecurity firm Kaspersky found most Europeans would consider technological augmentation to their bodies, with 81% of Italians saying they would mull this, versus 33% of those in the U.K. Older respondents were more supportive of augmentation that would enhance their health, while younger persons were more interested in augmenting their appearance and sporting abilities. Nearly half (48%) of men surveyed considered human augmentation "completely" or "mostly" acceptable, compared to roughly a third (38%) of women surveyed. All supporters prioritized improving physical health and quality of life via augmentation, yet 69% expected only wealthy individuals would be able to afford such enhancements, and 88% fear their augmented bodies could be exploited by cybercriminals.  ... "

Alexa and HIPAA

 Skill directions in healthcare.  Requirements are interesting.

Amazon Opens Applications for HIPAA-Eligible Alexa Skills
 Eric Hal Schwartz on September 11, 2020 at 1:00 pm

Amazon is expanding its HIPAA-compliant Alexa skill program, a year after it first debuted. Any interested voice app developer may now apply for the special certification proving the skill complies with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and with Amazon’s standards for those skills. As applying voice technology to healthcare becomes more popular, offering a guide toward HIPAA compliance could help position Amazon as a leader in the space.

HIPAA Alexa
Amazon unveiled its HIPAA-compliance program over a year ago. Six voice apps and the Alexa platform were certified by the government as safe to collect and distribute Protected Health Information (PHI) appropriately. Talkspace, Boston Children’s Hospital, and the others were all invited to participate in the program, and until now, it has remained an invite-only program. At the time, Amazon painted the limits as necessary to test and improve how the program would operate, including the release of an Alexa Skills Kit specifically for healthcare. T Developers must explain why they want the certification, how they will get people to find and use it, and how it will offer a “compelling experience” for users. Just technically complying with all of the guidelines is not enough, and Amazon has made it clear that not every application will be approved, regardless of a developer’s technical ability.  ... " 

Physician Voice Assistant Suki

Have now seen several related system, it appears none of these have been successful.

Physician Voice Assistant Startup Suki Closes $20M Funding Round 
 Eric Hal Schwartz in Voicebot

Suki, the developer of an eponymous voice assistant for healthcare professionals, has raised $20 million in a Series B funding round led by Flare Capital Partners. The new funding just short of two years after the startup closed a previous $20 million round of venture capital investment for its technology.

SUKI EVOLUTION
Suki’s voice assistant is designed as a tool for doctors that applies artificial intelligence and machine learning to collecting and transcribing notes and patient conversations. The AI can automatically can fill in Electronic Health Records (EHR), with relevant information. The point is to take over the doctor’s data entry duties to give them more time to care for patients. Suki claims that using its voice assistant cuts the time a doctor spends on paperwork by three-quarters. That’s no small thing when too much administrative work has consistently been ranked as a leading cause of doctors burning out and quitting the profession.

Breyer Capital and Epsilon Health joined Flare in the new investment round, along with previous investors First Round Capital and Venrock, the leader of the last funding round. The new capital will be used for hiring new employees and developing additional features for the voice assistant. The company has already begun expanding its partnerships and leadership including integrating its technology into Rx.Health’s toolkit for detecting and limiting physician burnout.

“It’s clear that physician burnout caused by documentation and administrative burden is a crisis in medicine, which is why we’ve seen such enthusiastic adoption of our technology to date and will continue this momentum with the support of our investors,” Suki CEO Punit Soni said in a statement. “Suki not only delivers a better physician experience but also supports high-quality, coordinated care and improved coding and billing through its accurate, detailed medical notes.”  .... "

On Assistants in Healthcare

Much work to be done on voice solutions to health problems.  The infrastructure is growing.

Industry Voices—Is Dr. Alexa ready to see you now? in FierceHealthcare   by Robin Cavanaugh

Smart speakers have become a ubiquitous part of our lives. In fact, by 2022 analysts expect that voice technology will reach 55% of U.S. households. Whether it’s a gut check on the day’s forecast or it’s time to place a grocery order, consumers are accustomed to saying, “Hey, Alexa,” and receiving an answer in mere seconds. Now, with Amazon Alexa becoming HIPAA-compliant, voice technology’s intersection with modern healthcare is poised to explode.

The goal of a HIPPA-compliant Alexa is to give consumers the opportunity to ask a voice assistant questions about their health, refill a prescription or make an appointment with their provider—ushering in a whole new era of patient experience.

It’s no secret that the U.S. healthcare system today is confusing. The global lack of access to essential health services further exacerbates the situation, with at least 400 million people worldwide facing obstacles preventing them from receiving treatment. A harmless condition can become serious if a person doesn’t have access to the right resources, information or tools to help follow their treatment plan.

While the shift to voice-activated technology in healthcare can reduce common barriers to care, there are still significant challenges for tech titans to overcome. Security and compliance are still top concerns, but more practical limitations must be addressed too before voice technology can become mainstream and viable in the healthcare ecosystem.     .... " 

Marketing Looks at Voice Assistants

Former colleague and correspondent Lou Killeffer of FiveMileRiver Marketing writes an interesting and cautious piece about voice assistants, AI and the future of tech for consumers.  Entitled:   Alexa, What just Happened here?  In particular is about two superbowl commercials that mark a turning point in how consumers think about 'assistance' from computers.   Which have now more obviously have entered our homes.      Good thoughts Lou. 

"... We just passed a tipping point that should be noted. And we're well on our way to who knows where with enormous implications. But like the easy to use and convenient services they promote, I think in hindsight Amazon's "Before Alexa" and Google's "Loretta" will be seen as “the spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go down”.  .... Even as precisely how "delightful",  and just for whom and how many, remains largely to be seen. .... " 

 

Why Don't People Use Voice to Buy?

 Good points made here about the buying use via smart speakers.   Privacy concerns and lack of screens hurt.    But it's also a matter of the speakers being unable to carry on a smart, contextual conversation about products.    The 'assistance' aspect of speakers is still not well delivered, making it hard to close the sale.

Why isn’t voice commerce taking off?  in Retailwire by Tom Ryan  with further expert opinion at the link.

eMarketer last week lowered its outlook for smart speaker buyers (consumers making a purchase via a smart speaker) and smart speaker users (consumers using smart speakers for any purpose).

In a statement, eMarketer said it believes smart speaker usage still faces hurdles over payment security and privacy. 

Hub Entertainment Research’s recently-released “The Case for Voice Control” study, based on a survey of 2,512 U.S. consumers, likewise found 59 percent of those who regularly use a smart speaker have concerns about privacy. Those concerns include the threats of unwanted listening (91 percent) and data being unknowingly collected (90 percent).

The heightened privacy concerns follow numerous stories of digital assistants eavesdropping in homes. European Union privacy watchdogs indicated last month that they’re working on ways to police the reach of digital assistants into private conversations.

eMarketer also points to the absence of screens on most smart speakers as an inhibitor. Although manufacturers are releasing smart speakers with screens, many users haven’t felt the need to upgrade.

“There’s a good deal of friction in the voice-based buying process because people can’t see what they’ll actually be purchasing unless they have a screen on their smart speaker,” said eMarketer principal analyst Victoria Petrock. “So, most of the purchases made today are reorders and things that don’t need to be inspected.”  ... " 

Decade of Voice Assistants

General but simplified history, worth a look. Platforms have been constructed, with lots of users.  Now how will they filled with meaningful assistance? How close to general AI will that evolve to?  How will it change the workplace and home?

The Decade of Voice Assistant Revolution
 By Eric Hall Schwartz in Voicebot.ai

The last 10 years have utterly transformed how people think about voice technology. From limited uses in just a few outlets, voice assistants are now integrating into every part of people’s lives. To encapsulate everything that has happened in ten years, we’ve picked a notable event from each year of the last decade to highlight and show how they marked a milestone in the way voice assistants have evolved and spread.  .... " 

Value of Using Google Assistance for Translation

What we always wanted, a seamless translation mode. That made us completely indifferent to the language in use.  Hearing and speaking.   Its not quite here yet,  I have tried it and its less than seamless or complete.   But its clearly moving in the right direction.   Its the ultimate assistance need though, so why not?   Will be taking a closer look in the new year.

Google Assistant Can Now Translate Speech Through Your Phone
Interpreter Mode comes to iOS and Android, making it easier to converse somewhat seamlessly across language barriers.Google Assistant Can Now Translate Speech Through Your Phone
Interpreter Mode comes to iOS and Android, making it easier to converse somewhat seamlessly across language barriers.

When I hopped into a cab in Barcelona last year, my taxi driver began asking me questions—you know, small talk. But his phrasing was awkward because English wasn't his native tongue. Cue a kludgy back and forth, with both of us having a hard time really understanding one another. That's when I whipped out Google Translate, and his eyes lit up as my phone conveyed his questions better than I ever could. It wasn't perfect, and he had to repeat himself a few times, but what flowed out was a proper conversation—one that wouldn't have been so easily possible a decade ago.

Translation apps like Google Translate or Microsoft Translator are familiar to world travelers. Now, Google is making it possible to have spoken conversations across language barriers without needing to download an app at all. The company has updated Google Assistant so that it supports translating languages in real time.   ... "

Contextual Intelligence: A Next Big Thing

Good overview piece in DSC.   I add some of our own experience using AI techniques.

We struggled with this a number of times.   All assistance exists in some context.  The context itself can be complex or not.   So for example we built a pump replacement system for choosing industrial pumps based on a dozen criteria.   Though this was technical, even including some predictive analytics,  it was straightforward.    Also easy to explain its details to the decision makers involved.   It also produced some additional meta information:  " how much did we, and would we spend on XYZ pumps next year, and what should their maintenance cost be?

But once we looked at complex systems.  Ones that depended on human behavior, required common sense decisions,  competitive reaction, this needed many sensory inputs, depended on the decisions of many other people and systems, the whole thing became difficult.  All this was asked in questions like "What profit is the company likely to make on new product X in the next year?"   At one point we estimated that such a question required several hundred external inputs.  Assistance in complex context is hard.  And you always end up with some risk/uncertainty attached to the assistance.     Even how the decision is implemented can add considerable risk and uncertainty.   Much work to be done.

Contextually Intelligent NLP Assistants – AI’s Next Big Technical Challenge   Posted by William Vorhies 

Summary:  Contextually intelligent, NLP-based interactive assistants are one of the next big things for AI/ML.  The tech is already here from recommendation engines.  The need to be more efficient and to become AI-augmented in our decision making is now.  Getting the contextual awareness is the hard part.

Last week we took the position that from a technical standpoint, ‘deeply inclusive and contextually sensitive’ AI is one of the two ‘next big things’ in AI.

In retrospect I wish there were a more concise agreed naming convention for this bit of technical legerdemain.  “Inclusive” and “contextually sensitive” are in the category of those ‘suitcase words’ Marvin Minsky called out as being so dependent on the user’s experience that agreement on meaning is difficult.

What we’re not talking about is the ability of NLP to hold a contextually appropriate conversation, such as making a reasonable response or request for clarification based on the topic at hand.  For the most part, short of performing psychoanalysis, chatbots can do pretty well with human ad hoc conversation.

Also, we’re not talking about being culturally inclusive as in detecting and eliminating bias.  Important, but not what we’re getting at.

What we’re describing is the next big step in NLP utility in which the NLP puts together facts it knows about us and proactively takes action or makes suggestions that make our life easier.

The example we gave in our previous article is about having the NLP assistant remind me of my mother’s upcoming birthday in a week or so without my having explicitly created a reminder.  More importantly my NLP assistant could make a recommendation for a present.  Presumably my past communications with her both in fact and tone contain some strong signals about my mom’s demographics and perhaps even her interests so why not predict a short list of appropriate gifts.  Now that would be valuable.

So perhaps a better description of this behavior then would be ‘contextually intelligent’.  We’ll stick with that.

Machines Collaborating with Humans

Good piece from BAIR: Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research.  Note the use of games to establish, demonstrate and experiment with collaborative interactions.  YES, there must be a level of appropriate contextual understanding to make collaboration work.   And such collaboration is the best form of assistance.   Descriptions and videos of game play in the below link:

Collaborating with Humans Requires Understanding Them
By Rohin Shah and Micah Carroll        Berkeley

AI agents have learned to play Dota, StarCraft, and Go, by training to beat an automated system that increases in difficulty as the agent gains skill at the game: in vanilla self-play, the AI agent plays games against itself, while in population-based training, each agent must play against a population of other agents, and the entire population learns to play the game.

This technique has a lot going for it. There is a natural curriculum in difficulty: as the agent improves, the task it faces gets harder, which leads to efficient learning. It doesn’t require any manual design of opponents, or handcrafted features of the environment. And most notably, in all of the games above, the resulting agents have beaten human champions.

The technique has also been used in collaborative settings: OpenAI had one public match where each team was composed of three OpenAI Five agents alongside two human experts, and the For The Win (FTW) agents trained to play Quake were paired with both humans and other agents during evaluation. In the Quake case, humans rated the FTW agents as more collaborative than fellow humans in a participant survey.

However, when we dig into the weeds, we can see that this is not a panacea. In the 2.5 minute discussion after the OpenAI Five cooperative game (see 4:33:05 onwards in the video), we can see that some issues did arise1:   ... "

Google Overviews Accessibility Efforts

Have always though of accessibility as having a goal of augmentation.   If its an assistant or simple access adjustment.  Good examples here.

Making technology accessible for everyone in the Google Blog
Super G pinata
Written by Keyword Team

The World Health Organization estimates that 15 percent of the world’s population—over 1 billion people—have a disability. October is National Disability Employment Awareness Month, an opportunity to look at how technology enables us to move toward a more accessible world. Google’s accessibility-first design mentality, coupled with advances in technology like AI, has led to the creation of new products for people with disabilities. And when we get it right, this technology will ultimately result in products that work better for all of us. It’s a perfect example of what we mean by building a more helpful Google for everyone. This month we will highlight some of those efforts and the people behind the work.    .... "

Collaboration with People, Smart Machines, Expanding

Especially I think as we get comfortable with assistants being part of teams to solve problems, get things done.  True purely social will evolve as well, but their negative implications are starting to be understood as well, I see people backing off goal-less attention.

Gartner Says Worldwide Social Software and Collaboration Revenue to Nearly Double by 2023
The worldwide market for social software and collaboration in the workplace is expected to grow from an estimated $2.7 billion in 2018 to $4.8 billion by 2023, nearly doubling in size, according to Gartner, Inc.

“The collaboration market is the most fragmented and contextually focused it has ever been, making the barrier to entry extremely low,” said Craig Roth, research vice president at Gartner. “By 2023, we expect nearly 60% of enterprise application software providers will have included some form of social software and collaboration functionalities in their software product portfolios.”

Evolution of the Collaboration Market

The collaboration market has fragmented into many submarkets – for instance, employee communications applications or meeting solutions – that often do not compete with each other.

“The market is not yet a winner-take-all space, creating opportunities for innovation that will expand the size of each submarket,” said Mr. Roth. “The future of social software and collaboration will leverage new capabilities like social analytics, virtual personal assistants (VPAs) and smart machines.” .... " 

Advancing AI in the Workplace: Ambient and Voice

Not un-expected, further intrigued about how much of it will be 'ambient', that is happening in the background and alerting the employee, and how much of it will be using voice control, after the very popular systems in the home.  Will Robo-Bosses become common?

Gartner: Get ready for more AI in the workplace in Computerworld
At the firm’s Digital Workplace Summit in London, analysts said they expect artificial intelligence to be common in the office by 2025; they already see ‘huge pent-up demand.’   By Matthew Finnegan

LONDON – Artificial intelligence (AI) will be widely adopted in office environments in a variety of ways over the next few years as businesses invest in digital workplace initiatives, Gartner analysts said today....

Assisting Visually Impaired Web Browsing

Screen reading plus voice assistance.   Good idea.

New Tool Makes Web Browsing Easier for the Visually Impaired 
University of Waterloo News
August 20, 2019

Researchers at the University of Waterloo in Canada, the University of Washington, and Microsoft have developed a tool that merges the best elements of voice assistants and screen readers to make free-form Web searches easier. The VERSE (Voice Exploration, Retrieval, and Search) tool allows people with visual impairments to get Web content quickly and easily. VERSE adds screen reader-like capabilities to virtual assistants, and allows other devices to serve as input accelerators to smart speakers. The researchers surveyed 53 visually impaired Web searchers, and found that more than half used voice assistants multiple times a day. Said Waterloo researcher Alexandra Vtyurina, "If people need more information, they can use VERSE to access other search verticals, for example, news, facts, and related searches, and can visit any article that appears as a search result."  .... "