Artificial Intelligence or AI, it is said by many, will be man’s last invention. Why? Because AI is more than just hardware and software, AI will allow machines to learn.
This machine learning will allow programs to make decisions and to think on their own. They will be able to iterate themselves, through trial and error, to perfection.
Eventually they will be able to think in a way that could surpass the capabilities of any human being.
So, it may be the last invention because these machines may just be able to make much better versions of themselves than we could,
and in turn they could become the next innovators and inventors of new technologies.
But there is shockingly small number of companies that are poised to dominate this potentially huge industry? Only 9.
In my view, these are the companies you should either try to work for, associate yourself with, or invest in.
Who are they and what are they working on…That’s coming up right now?
The future of AI is being shaped by just 9 companies. This could be good or it could be scary.
Good because these companies can potentially all agree on certain technology standards, and set safety regulations so that the potential harm due to AI is minimized.
Scary because it means that these few companies have the potential to become the dominant overlords of human society in the not too distant future.
These companies dominate because they are the ones that have nearly all the patents, are creating most of the software, setting the industry standards, have the university partnerships, are attracting the best talent, and pouring the most money into it.
Here they are in alphabetical order.
Alibaba
They are the third largest ecommerce company in the world. They are investing $15B in global research labs in multiple countries dedicated to AI innovations.
This is smart because they can take advantage of AI talent all over the world.
One example of their AI innovation is their newest chatbot which can understand human emotions, and respond accordingly, including alerting service reps to intervene.
They have 200 AI powered robots in automated warehouses that process one million shipments per day.
And in addition, they are creating AI robots in the hospitality sector that can deliver meals and laundry to guests.
Amazon
is the largest ecommerce company in the world, with $180B in revenue, and over half a million employees.
You are probably already familiar with Alexa, its intelligent voice assistant AI robot that is a part of many homes around the world.
Amazon has expanded this technology to something called Amazon Lex. Amazon Polly, and Amazon Rekognition. These technologies are involved in text to speech conversion, and face recognition using artificial intelligence.
In addition, amazon is working on AI powered self-guided drones that can deliver products weighing as much as an unbelievable – one ton.
You may have also heard about their AI powered cashier-less stores called Amazon Go. They are at the forefront of using AI technology for practical uses.
Machine learning is already part of their core shopping platform at amazon.com. They use it to determine product search rankings, recommendations, and ad placement.
Apple
The most familiar AI application from apple is their Siri voice assistant available to millions of iPhone users around the world. But apple is going far beyond that.
They recently hired Google’s chief of search and artificial intelligence, John Giannandrea, to run its machine learning and AI strategy. He is now even part of apple’s executive board, which shows you how much Apple values his role.
They have invested in a range of AI startups, including Emotient, which produces facial recognition technology, Vocal IQ, which provides a platform for voice interfaces, and Silk Labs, which makes AI software for consumer devices.
Apple hopes to gain an edge on its rivals through a focus on protecting user data as well as using their data to create new applications.
Apple CEO, Tim Cook announced that they will be investing $10 Billion building data centers just in the U.S. These data centers will power their AI technologies.
Baidu
Chinese tech company Baidu is the largest provider of Chinese language internet search as well as other digital products and services. They are arguably the most advanced AI company in China
To give you an idea of how they emphasize AI, they use facial recognition technology in their main offices instead of the typical company ID cards.
If you work for Baidu, you can even order tea from a vending machine using your face.
They have a voice assistant called DuerOS that has accumulated more conversation-based skill sets than Alexa, Siri or Cortana.
n addition, they have invested in deep learning in the medical field and self-driving cars
Being a Chinese company gives them two advantages over U.S. companies – First, a native population of nearly 1.4 billion, roughly four times that of the United States, gives Baidu a lot more data to work with potentially.
Second, China itself has publicly set the goal of being the world’s leader in AI by 2030, and the Chinese government subsidizes national priorities. So plenty of free money is potentially available to companies like Baidu.
Whereas, AI is not a currently priority for the U.S. administration.
You might say Facebook has been forced to be a player in AI. With 2.3 billion regular users, about a one third of all humanity, it is impossible to have every post and image reviewed by humans.
And it would be a little scary for its users too. So they are using deep learning software to monitor their content.
Mike Schroepfer, the company’s chief technology officer, says the technology is the only way to prevent bad actors from taking advantage of the service.
Facebook’s AI software not only monitors content, but it also chooses the content that appears in the Facebook News Feed, automatically tags photos, and power the ad-targeting software that makes Facebook billions of dollars every year.
It can even flag what it considers “fake news”.
Machine learning becomes more intelligent in proportion to the amount of data it has to work with.
Guess which company has access to some of the most valuable data in the world from 2.3 billion monthly users. You got it – Facebook.
In 2018, Facebook hired Jérôme Pesenti away from IBM’s Watson division, to lead the Facebook AI Research team.
So, they now have a powerhouse leader on their team.
Google has arguably been the most aggressive company in the world on AI research, creating everything from self-driving cars, to software that can recognize cats.
They are so serious about dominating this space, that they are even developing their own line of machine learning chips.
AI plays a central role in Google’s strategy for future growth under CEO Sundar Pichai who said,
“In the long run, we’re evolving in computing from an ‘AI-first’ world,”
Google bought DeepMind in 2014, which is AI startup.
DeepMind has since been used to defeat champion players of the board game “GO” – which at one time was considered impossible to do by a computer.
Google’s biggest application of AI is to power the algorithm in its flagship search engine.
In addition Google Assistant uses AI for natural language processing to interpret voice commands. These are just the technologies we know about –
but google is reported to be working on some paradigm shifting technologies that they are taking great pains to keep from the world. So who knows what they will come up with next.
It’s no wonder that Google’s market valuation is nearly $1 trillion.
IBM
IBM’s most notable investment in AI is Watson, a a deep learning program that can answer questions posed in natural language by extract meaning from photos, videos, text and speech.
Watson was popularly introduced to the world on the U.S. game show Jeopardy, where it handily beat to of its all time best human players.
IBM has a partnership with MIT and are investing $240M over 10 years in Watson alone.
The technology behind Watson has gained traction in industries from insurance to healthcare.
Microsoft
Microsoft has been on an AI shopping spree, buying five companies built on AI technology in 2018 alone.
In addition, they launched a venture capital fund called Microsoft Ventures dedicated to fund AI startups.
Satya Nadella, their CEO has a vision that AI can solve many of the world’s problems.
They have declared that they are on a quest to enable computers that can understand what they see, communicate in natural language, answer complex questions and interact with their environment.
Current applications of AI are used to power chatbots in Skype, analyze data in Office 365, build apps in Azure, support interaction with Cortana, and to power its search results in Bing similar to the way Google does it.
They have elite talent in some of the best programmers in the world, and they are not afraid to focus this talent on artificial intelligence research.
Tencent
Tencent is a Chinese holding company involved in internet technology and AI. They are the company behind the WeChat app, China’s biggest social media platform.
In addition they have substantial businesses in messaging, payments, video, mail and social media. There is no similar U.S. company.
They are focused on four areas for AI application: content, social, online games and cloud services.
They claim that over a hundred Tencent products, including WeChat and QQ their instant messaging app use AI technology,
Like Baidu, they have some advantages being a Chinese company. But the main advantage they have is that their many popular platforms give it access to data and ways to test and implement real-world AI software, in a country where fewer consumer privacy protections exist.
The company believes there will be huge applications tomorrow that are impossible to envision today, so it is putting investment bets in many areas of AI.
Let me know if you think I missed a company. And if you work for any of these companies, I would love to hear your perspective.
I’ll see you in the comments below.
