Google opens AI center in China despite exclusion from nation’s internet
Google announced, on December 13th, that they will open a new AI center in Beijing, despite being excluded from China’s internet.
“AI companies in China suck up personal data from the massive population and use it to train machine-learning algorithms — but Google, locked out of the internet, has little user data to pull from in the country.
For now it is focusing on making use of Chinese talent. Roughly half of its 600 employees in China are engineers working on global products, said company spokesman Taj Meadows.”
Source: JAPAN TIMES
The agony and ecstasy of conversational commerce
“Today, consumers do the heavy cognitive lifting in these transactions, engaging with customer services as they would a computer, not a human. A consumer has a need, translates that need into a series of inputs and outputs and then gets some kind of action in return.Today, chatbots are good at fetching information, presenting information, answering binary questions or checking the status of something. That’s not a conversation — it’s a “hard-coded form” made up of decision trees, she said. Once tasks get to be more complex, the ability of chatbots to understand intent begins to break down.”
What can businesses do: AI talent is still very expensive and considerable amount of data is needed to feed AI technology, but this shouldn’t discourage businesses from testing chatbots or virtual assistants. But first, there is a need to consider if it is the best fit or not.
