This is what the Big 4 Think about AI

Artificial intelligence  is more than a buzzword now. It is revolutionizing the world by creating on-demand solutions in any field that it is deployed in. The romanticization of AI in Sci-Fi like C3PO and Skynet, does serve for inspiration, but it often leads to people thinking that AI is all about robots, decision making machines and self driving cars, while there is so much more to it. Infact, it is in the small implementations that AI is truly changing the world. 

Today, we review the direction in which AI is progressing by having a look at the AI vision of the big 4, Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft.

Apple

Tim Cook, Apple's CEO made the company's AI vision clear last year when he spoke about how the company bets the future on AI.
Apple is already using AI to improve the battery life of your iPhone and serve you recommendations on Apple Music. 
Cook also addressed the concern on AI killing jobs, asserting that it is a reality that governments are scared to address right now. On the plus though, Apple plans to deliver AI in hospitals using iPads, or for keeping the elderly safe, by tracking, reminders and SOS messages through the iWatch. 
Soon after this talk, the company promised that it will publish AI research papers of its own and within a month, Apple had already come up with the first one, based on image recognition using computer generated images rather than real life images. 
iOS 10 further expands the company's AI domain with Facial Recognition built in, and a load more hefty new features which just go on to show how serious Apple is.


Facebook


Facebook has a special place in the AI ecosystem, because of the huge amount of user data it has at its disposal(in the form of your posts, comments, sent and even unsent messages!)
With that kind of data, Facebook is able to predict your activity, serve you links that you would enjoy, and in general, try to make your experience seamless. Its not all good, though. Very recently, facebook was under the Scanner for the Fake news scam. What happened was that the content that shows up on your feed is prioritized based on user engagement, and naturally, fake gossip is more engaging, and thus spreads across the network faster. This lead to a lot of deliberations as to whether Facebook should be held accountable for making fake news viral. 
However, setbacks such as these are bound to occur and only help in highlighting where AI is going wrong so that we can rectify the issues early on. 
Lastly, a very practical example of AI was endorsed by Zuckerburg when he showed off Jarvis, a voice assistant for automating tasks around the house. 

Google 



Google is the undoubted leader in this segment. If I was to list down everything they have achieved or plan to achieve, that would be more content than we have published till date! However I will give you a brief walkthrough of some of the wackiest AI projects of the company. 

1. The Google Self Driving Car: Probably the most famous of Google's AI Ventures. Waymo is the company under Google which develops these cars. The cars are powered by machine learning aided by a Lidar System(similar to SONAR, but uses light) to know about nearby obstacles and high resolution maps. The cars have already proved their worth and may soon be part of the vehicle ecosystem.

2. Quick, Draw! : This is one of the fun projects by the Google Creative Lab. The system tells you to draw an object and gets it AI to try and recognize it. The fun part is, the more you draw, the better the system gets, adding your drawings to its dataset. Check it out for yourself, here.

3. Deep Mind: This is Google's company specifically created for AI and Deep Learning. It shot to fame the their project, AlphaGo beat the top player of Go, an ancient Chinese game much more complicated than chess, demonstrating how AI is not just here to mimic humans, but to be better than them. Visit them at https://deepmind.com/.



Microsoft






Though they might not be talkative about it, Microsoft's AI development in not lacklustre. During a short span, Microsoft has released APIs for face detection, emotion recognition, computer vision and whatnot. Their Augmented Reality project with the HoloLens is also promising, though behind schedule. Back this March, the company asserted its allegience to AI, with Nifty apps like Story Remix, which make your videos look more awesome. 


In Summary
The visions of the four have become more or less aligned with all of them heading in the direction of an AI first approach. Thus, they are on an unsaid collision course. While Google has the lead, the other three, notably Facebook, have made it clear that  they are not to be written off. One thing is for sure: The Future is AI, and the war over the future has begun. 
What do you think? Let us know in the comments below.

PS- I have refrained from bringing Siri, Messenger, Google Assistant and Cortana into the discussion. Though they are exemplary examples of AI in use, they tend to draw too much attention on themselves, thus distracting us from the issue. That is an article, for next time. 

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