This week’s blog is about investing in artificial intelligence. I have done a deep dive into the handful of mega-companies out there and I can tell you the landscape is rather bleak despite troves of money chasing the dream of “thinking machines.”  I have come to the belief that the field is comprised of people seeking to “improve the candle with the hopes of inventing a lightbulb” and that the human-machine interface is always going to be twenty years in the future, no matter what point in time you select in the future. Truthfully, the way we interact is through language and natural language is actually a very difficult thing to teach a software program. And even though we are electromagnetic, putting a bunch of electrodes on your scalp is a very very long way from creating actual two way modulation and demodulation of machine and human “cognition”.

In contrast, over the last two two years I have had the pleasure of getting to know Peter Voss, the founder of AGI innovations, the creators of the AiGO technology. They are on the correct path and I would like to see if there is anyone out there that would be interested in helping them. Here is an interview I did with Peter last year:

Peter’s company seeks qualified investors would be interested in an introduction to his company, AGI innovations, or AiGO.ai. They are investors or entities who have a strategic contribution but more passive future-focused individuals are also welcome.

In a nutshell, here are the potential benefits of the AiGO technology. 

1) The natural language processing is superior to the brute force AI that, by nature, uses pattern recognition and statistical inference from what other users USUALLY mean. AiGO creates actual grammar and cognition, resulting in a more flexible and abstract ability to converse.

2) Voice control of software is what we are “used to” from science fiction but the current billion dollar attempts like Siri and Alexa are a failure. Even Microsoft dropped their Cortana voice control from the current Windows 10 builds because it didn’t work.

3) The partnerships with businesses will be revenue-producing soon but they need working capital to hire more engineers and a Chief Technical Officer that were posted Oct 2nd on the AGI3 website yesterday.

From my many conversations with Peter and Srini (the Chief Value Officer), here is my understanding of the opportunity that investment presents. Simply stated, the improvement of current AI will not be able to reach a satisfactory user experience because there is no “top down” abstract language structure. It is all predictive programming and therefore lacks general intelligence. It predicts what you want to type based on what others type, not based on logical context clues like a person or AiGO does. AiGO creates a customized ontology (study of what exists) to each user that is indelible and makes for a better experience.

The current AI are not customizable nor can they adapt to individual users so the user experience is frustrating. Watch this video for an illustration comparing and contrasting brute force AI and adaptive AiGO.

AiGO has tens of thousands of man-hours of a “head start” versus the competition because they have taught the software how to parse language and disambiguate it into functional grammatical units of understanding. I have seen the thing break down my own sentences into units of verbs, nouns, and prepositions and then “understand” the new information that I presented to it. Predictive language AI simply cannot do this because it is trying to guess rather than trying to understand.

Of course, as with any investment, there are many risks and I am not an investment advisor. I only wish to help this company succeed and I believe there might be a potential for a significant return on investment as they are currently in final negotiations with companies to partner in consumer facing and internal business CRM software joint ventures.  The reason they need money now is to hire people to make the already existing core software learn the commands and workings of actual platforms. That requires programmers.

If you would like me to arrange an introduction, I will be happy to do so if it seems like a good fit.  Email me at “drpark@rechargebiomedical.com” if you know someone or an entity that would be interested in investing $5-10 million USD  into this company for a 10-20% equity stake and board representation.  I have the greatest confidence in the ingenuity, diligence, and ethics of everyone at AGI3 and would not hesitate to partner with them as they create the future of voice-controlled software and eventually, true artificial GENERAL intelligence.

Disclosure: I am not a registered broker-dealer but more of a fan. That said if the introduction results in a mutually satisfactory partnership, then there is a possibility of a “success fee” or consultancy that may be granted to me although there is no formal agreement as such. 

Postscript:  I am grateful that Peter and Srini have been very gracious in entertaining my many questions about the ethics, deep structure, and philosophy of what they are doing. Peter and his programmers (whom he calls “psychologists”) are truly focused on bringing this product to market and constantly improving it. That said, he and I have lively discussions about the nature of “affective” computing or emotions for the more accurate simulation of human-like consciousness. He took issue with this blog posting that I shared but I stand by it: https://www.rechargebiomedical.com/human-intelligence-is-unique/

As I wrote about in my book, The Telomere Miracle, human though is encoded with emotional meta-tags as a way of assigning relative importance given the fact that our finite computing space is contained in a bony 10-lb dome atop our necks. Peter is very aware of the absence fascination, attention, curiosity, analogy, self-preservation, goosebumps, and humor in AGI but he maintains that they could be engineered. In fact, there are companies that already specialize in decoding emotions through speech and facial expressions that they are considering partnering with. One of the fun things about the software is that accents and voices, say of your favorite celebrities, could be used to interact as voice “skins”. Imaging having a software pilot that sounds like HAL-9000 or Scarlet Johansen!  What fun that would be!  You could change the voice skins like you would a ring tone and have a different one for different programs.  Think of the fun we could have if the emulation of personality and relevant facts and ideas of real people could be improved and then used with the appropriate voice skins!

Instead of an actor or animatronic robot playing Mark Twain or Abe Lincoln, you could have an actual emulation. That would take the old Disney D ticket and kick it up to an E+, don’t you think?! 

Without investment capital, AiGO may not succeed and we may be stuck with the dumb AI that makes all the frustrating Type 2 errors (false negative) that I blogged about in here. 

Truth, Justice, and the American Way

http://www.rechargebiomedical.com/truth-justice-and-the-american-way/

If you are out there and considering that this might be like investing in Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs in 1977, then please contact me.  People want machines to work the way they do in TV and movies and from what I can tell, the only way to achieve this will be improving abstract general intelligence, not from improving powerful but rigid “guess-bots” that we all despise.