AI on your lock screen

For the last 10 years, news feeds have been the main way — the mainstream user interface — to discover interesting and relevant digital content. Today, news feeds, from Facebook and Twitter to LinkedIn, Instagram and Pinterest, are surfacing the interesting news and moments from your social network and favorite sources.

This is about to change. The push notifications on the lock screen of your personal mobile device are turning your lock screen into the new news feed. The lock screen is thus becoming the pivotal interface to access and experience any of the updates and content that you consider to be worth noticing.

Therefore, your lock screen and your mobile device, not the apps, become the nexus for all the personal data flows, feeding machine learning algorithms soon running also on your personal hardware.

This is a fundamental change. It will change the way your digital experience is personalized. It will change the way AI systems can learn from you. And it will change the power balance between the big industry behemoths such as Facebook, Google and Apple.

Facebook built an AI system that learned to lie to get what it wants

Humans are natural negotiators. We arrange dozens of tiny little details throughout our day to produce a desired outcome: What time a meeting should start, when you can take time off work, or how many cookies you can take from the cookie jar.

Machines typically don’t share that affinity, but new research from Facebook’s AI research lab might offer a starting point to change that. The new system learned to negotiate from looking at each side of 5,808 human conversations, setting the groundwork for bots that could schedule meetings or get you the best deal online.

Microsoft’s AI beats Ms. Pac-Man

As with so many things in the world, the key to cracking Ms. Pac-Man is team work and a bit of positive reinforcement. That… and access to funding from Microsoft and 150-plus artificial intelligence agents — as Maluuba can now attest.

Last month, the Canadian deep learning company (a subsidiary of Microsoft as of January) became the first team of AI programmers to beat the 36-year-old classic.

It was a fairly anticlimactic defeat. The number hit 999,990, before the odometer flipped back over to zero. But it was an impressive victory nonetheless, marking the first time anyone — human or machine — has achieved the feat. It’s been a white whale for the AI community for a while now.

A Facebook AI Unexpectedly Created Its Own Unique Language

A recent Facebook report on the way chatbots converse with each other has given the world a glimpse into the future of language.

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In the report, researchers from the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research lab (FAIR) describe training their chatbot “dialog agents” to negotiate using machine learning. The chatbots were eager and successful dealmaking pupils, but the researchers eventually realized they needed to tweak their model because the bots were creating their own negotiation language, diverting from human languages.

To put it another way, when they used a model that allowed the chatbots to converse freely, using machine learning to incrementally improve their conversational negotiation strategies as they chatted, the bots eventually created and used their own non-human language.

At AI bot startups, cool kids rule

You would think at least one AI-powered humanoid bot would have a properly nerdy name. Maybe a Poindexter or Hildegarde to add some natural language processing to your customer chat app?

No such luck. Instead, it sounds like the cool kids are in charge at most digital assistant and bot startups. Think short, peppy names that top the popular baby name lists. There’s Aiden and Riley putting AI to work for marketers. Mya can chip in with recruiting. And Ava helps the hearing impaired. You get the idea.

Those are some of the more than 20 recently funded startups in the Crunchbase dataset with a human-sounding name that are developing some sort of digital assistant or AI bot. They’re working on tools for across a range of consumer and enterprise tasks, from lead generation and customer service to tracking personal finances.