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Blog – Page 10962

From AlphaGo’s historic victory against world champion Lee Sedol to DeepStack’s sweeping win against professional poker players, artificial intelligence is clearly on a roll.

Part of the momentum comes from breakthroughs in artificial neural networks, which loosely mimic the multi-layer structure of the human brain. But that’s where the similarity ends. While the brain can hum along on energy only enough to power a light bulb, AlphaGo’s neural network runs on a whopping 1,920 CPUs and 280 GPUs, with a total power consumption of roughly one million watts—50,000 times more than its biological counterpart.

Extrapolate those numbers, and it’s easy to see that artificial neural networks have a serious problem—even if scientists design powerfully intelligent machines, they may demand too much energy to be practical for everyday use.

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Most chat bots are dumb. No one wants to message a soulless stack of if-then statements just to order a pizza when a half-decent app or website interface can do the same job in half the time.

Chat assistants are a different matter. Rather than actively bugging you for information in a back-and-forth no one enjoys having, chat assistants lurk in the background of the conversations you’re already having and glean little details that might help later. It’s the approach Google is taking with their aptly named Assistant.

Niles, a company in Y Combinator’s Winter 2017 batch, wants to be your company’s chat assistant — an alternative to that internal wiki that every company has and no one uses. It sits in Slack and tries to learn the answers to the questions that your team is tired of hearing for the billionth time.

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Will vegetarians start eating meat if this works out?

Lab-grown meat is a not a new concept. We’ve had the meatball, the world’s most expensive beefburger, and possibly shrimp. Now it’s the turn of chicken and duck.

San Francisco-based startup, Memphis Meats, has produced the very first “clean meat” poultry grown from cells in a lab, serving them up in a taste test that included classic southern fried chicken and decidedly fancy duck a l’orange.

Memphis Meats is one of a handful of biotech companies hoping to create commercially available in vitro meat that has all the flavor, texture, and nutrition of meat, without the killing of animals. Using the same technique as their previous beef meatball, the scientists cultured regenerative stem cells taken from the birds and placed them in bioreactor tanks. Once culturing in a sugar and mineral solution, it only takes a few weeks before they are ready to harvest.

Continue reading “World’s First Lab-Grown Chicken Has Been Tasted And Apparently It’s Delicious” | >