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The out-there AI ideas designed to keep the US ahead of China

President Trump signed an executive order last month to launch the US government’s AI strategy, called the American AI Initiative. Kratsios, who is also the government’s deputy chief technology officer, has been the driving force behind White House strategy on AI. The American AI Initiative calls for more funding  and will make data and computing resources available to AI researchers.

But many of the algorithms now considered AI were developed many years ago, and they are fundamentally limited. “We are harvesting the intellectual fruit that was planted decades ago,” says John Everett, deputy director of DARPA’s Information Innovation Office. “That’s why we’re looking at far forward challenges—challenges that might not come to fruition for a decade.”

Through its AI Next program, DARPA has launched nine major research projects meant to tackle those limitations. They include a major effort to teach AI programs common sense, a weakness that often causes today’s systems to fail. Giving AI a broader understanding of the world—something that humans take for granted—could eventually make personal assistants more helpful and easier to chat with, and it could help robots navigate unfamiliar environments.

Another DARPA project will seek to develop AI programs that learn using less data. Training data is the lifeblood of machine learning, and algorithms that can ingest more of it can leap ahead of the competition. An innovation in this area could knock out a key advantage of tech companies operating in China, for example, which thrive on their access to an abundance of data. Other projects being funded focus on designing more efficient AI chips; exploring ways to explain the decision-making of opaque machine-learning tools; and making AI programs more secure.

See the full story here: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613089/the-out-there-ai-ideas-designed-to-keep-the-us-ahead-of-china/