Samsung demonstrated hand gesture recognition using a neuromorphic chip by IBM that contained 1M artificial neurons.  It’s cool.  Literally.  The chip uses 100x less heat than a laptop, on our way to emulating the incredible efficiency of the human brain.  To put the 1M neurons in perspective, the human brain has 86 billion neurons.

Let the Augmented Reality (AR) games begin!  Pokemon Go seems to defy all odds that 1% of 1% of the App Store drives all traffic and the mobile app world is “done.”  Mark Zuckerberg talks of virtual reality and those big, heavy headsets as a transitional step towards true AR, where digital creations blend with our camera.   Nintendo threw down the gauntlet with Pokemon Go, a game where creatures appear on your camera, playing catch.  Go is nearly the size of Twitter on Android… in two weeks.  The following pic sums up the craziness

The source code to the Apollo 11 command module (CM) and guidance computer (AGC) are now on GitHub here.   Coding, Mad-Men style.

Otto is a new startup founded shortly after @geohot demonstrated his driverless car system, which George invented in his garage.  Otto will focus on kits to retrofit trucks, turning them into autonomous vehicles.  Connected, self-driving trucks become the packet-switched version of trains.  This is getting interesting.

Geoff Hinton gave a talk recently where he described why early learning systems, well, didn’t learn all that much.   Basically, not enough horsepower and too little data.

I remember firing up my LISP program to emulate neural networks.  We’d feed the code images of handwritten letters, let it run overnight, often ending up in a “swapping disaster” where  the LISP machine became inoperable.  We’d reboot and try again.  Finally, after days, we’d feed it a handwritten letter to see if it learned anything. The computer would work for several minutes, then finally spit out “2.”  Well how about that!  AI does OCR.  :-)

We’ve come a long way.

Let’s see.  How do you outdo landing a spent rocket on a tiny drone ship, in the ocean, with almost no fuel?   Reuse the same rocket, put a satellite in orbit, then land in the dark.  This is amazing!

Sony has patented a contact lens that records video and images, all controlled through blinking.  I bet an integrated display is next!  Our lives will continue to blend with the always-on, always-connected world of AI.

Over time, the computer itself—whatever its form factor—will be an intelligent assistant helping you through your day. We will move from mobile first to an AI first world.

— Sundar Pichai, CEO, Google, 28 April 2016

First we had Shakespeare sonnets and Irish Folk music, all using a slick 100-line Python script for Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) by Andrej Karpathy.  An MIT hacker feasted on Donald Trump speeches to give us DeepDrumpf.   This month a group of techies wrote an RNN, ingested all the transcripts of Full House, and now generate Hollywood scripts on demand.

Casey Johnson forecasts the evolution of the chronological social feed into curated feeds that bring you exactly what you want.   This is a terrific use case for AI and deep learning , making computers helpful and easier to use.

Photo Credit: NyMag