Five of the largest tech giants have signed a cooperation agreement to promote artificial intelligence technologies to the public. In early September, The New York Times reported that Google, Facebook, Microsoft, IBM and Amazon held a joint meeting to discuss an artificial intelligence project. And now the details of this meeting have become known.
Called the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society, the agreement has several objectives, one of which is to educate people about what research is AI does not necessarily mean research into killer robots.
As part of this cooperation, the companies will try to explain and convince the public of the openness, safety and importance of conducting research on technologies related to artificial intelligence. In addition, within the framework of cooperation, it is planned to create an open platform where researchers and major players in the AI field can communicate with each other.
The website created under this initiative reports:
“We believe that artificial intelligence technologies can improve the quality of life for people and help humanity to solve the most important problems of our time, such as climate change, global food shortages, global inequality, health and education.”
All five companies that signed this cooperation agreement have major developments and ongoing projects in the field of artificial intelligence. IBM, for example, has a Watson computer; Google now owns DeepMind, which you may remember from the AlphaGo project; Amazon has Alexa, a voice assistant integrated into Echo smart speakers; Microsoft, in turn, has Cortana and many chatbot projects. After all, Facebook is considering integrating AI algorithms into many of its services. The first signs were facial recognition technology and smart news feed.
Despite such a confident lineup of the project, some cannot understand why one very famous player is missing from them - Apple. Eric Horwitz of Microsoft, who is one of the co-chairs of the collaboration project, told The Guardian that they spoke with Cupertino on this issue:
“I know they are very enthusiastic about this agreement and personally would very much like them to join us,” said Horwitz.
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Another overlooked name on the list is Elon Musk with his OpenAI project, a non-profit artificial intelligence research initiative that will be open to everyone. This could change and these parties will also be part of the collaboration, as the backbone plans to attract more people and organizations around the world to become part of this agreement.
NIKOLAY KHIZHNYAK
