British AI companies are helping turn AI from science fiction into reality. DeepMind developed an AI system that taught itself to play 49 Atari games without prior instruction. DeepMind was acquired by Google for £300 million. Smaller UK startups are now commercializing more specific AI applications, like using computer vision to enhance images (Magic Pony) or automate customer service responses (Celaton). These "narrow" AI applications demonstrate progress beyond previous limitations and show AI's potential in technologies like smart devices and autonomous vehicles.
British companies helping to turn AI from science fiction into fact | The Times
1. 15/06/2015 14:07British companies helping to turn AI from science fiction into fact | The Times
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Rob Bishop and Zehan Wang, co-founders of Magic Pony, are innovators in artificial intelligence Richard Pohle
British companies helping to turn AI from science fiction into fact
David Waller
Published at 12:01AM, June 15 2015
At first, the video clip doesn’t look like a landmark in science. Given the task of teaching
itself how to beat 49 classic Atari video games, the computer clearly has no idea what’s
going on — but it doesn’t last. Within two hours, it plays those games like a fortysomething
who hasn’t seen daylight since the early 1980s, announcing itself in the process as the first
artificial intelligence system to teach itself disparate tasks from scratch.
There was a time when AI was the preserve of science fiction, of Isaac Asimov and I, Robot.
Now it is big business. DeepMind Technologies, the British company that developed the
system, was snapped up by Google for £300 million last year.
In October DeepMind said, in turn, that it was acquiring Vision Factory, a UK start-up
working on image recognition, and Dark Blue Labs, another homegrown fledgeling doing
similar work in speech recognition. It also launched a tie-up with the University of Oxford
2. 15/06/2015 14:07British companies helping to turn AI from science fiction into fact | The Times
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computer science department. And with these deals, Google has put itself squarely at the
head of the field of “deep learning”, the AI process that many hope will lead to the
industry’s holy grail — achieving human-like intelligence in machines.
Given that Google’s ambitions in the sector are obvious, smaller companies with any
intelligence of their own might be expected to give it a wide berth. Not so. With the big
groups focused on the bigger and more distant goal of cracking the nut known as general
AI, entrepreneurs are focusing on filling in the gaps, using the giant strides made already
to tackle more immediate and niche challenges.
Magic Pony Technology is using this more narrow AI to improve video processing. The
London-based start-up’s platform can improve the resolution of any image, or compress it
to a smaller file size with no loss of quality, because it has seen enough similar images to
guess intelligently the details that should be there — in the same way that a person could
draw the rest of a chair if handed a picture that shows only the middle part. The company
is aiming the technology at mobile brands serving emerging markets such as India and
Africa, where bandwidth is not strong to handle the video-streaming demands of
smartphone users.
“We’re a team of seven at the moment, largely part-time,” Rob Bishop, Magic Pony’s co-
founder, says, “but we can do powerful things. With developments like Amazon web
services, we can run our own supercomputer in the cloud from just a few thin laptops.”
Magic Pony is about to close a seven-figure round of investment, which may sound fanciful
to naysayers. After all, AI has been touted as the next big thing since the days when Atari
represented the pinnacle of video games. However, the processing power was not there
then: programmers had to teach computers rigid rules over how things worked, so AI
stumbled.
“It’s like the old joke about the Daleks,” says Mike Lynch, the co-founder of Autonomy and
former machine learning academic at Cambridge, who is investing in young several AI
companies as the chief executive of Invoke Capital. “Their plans for world domination were
fine until they hit a step. But while AI was at the level of a sea urchin a few years ago, it’s
now around the level of a two-year-old.”
The unique fact about this particular two-year-old is that it can handle certain tasks — such
as pattern-spotting, fact-checking or cross-referencing — far better than any adult. A
computer also can work much more quickly and take on a far greater workload, all without
taking a lunch break.
Celaton, based in Milton Keynes, brands its inSTREAM platform as “the best knowledge
worker you’ve ever hired”, able to make sense of the reams of unstructured information
that bombard large organisations on a daily basis. Celaton says that inSTREAM can
recognise the nature of a customer complaint, for example, understand why it has
happened and craft a personalised response with minimum human input. The company
says that turnover will rise to £4.5 million in the next financial year.
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