The SCET has been a close follower of the progress of AI over the last few months – the industry has been buzzing with popularity in 2016, especially since Deep Mind’s victory over the world’s best Go player in a highly publicized contest. AI’s fast progress into evolving to the human mind has explored one further dimension this past week – Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. used artificial intelligence to predict the winner of a popular Chinese reality TV singing competition – and got the winner and finalists all correct. WSJ headlined the significance of this prediction perfectly – ‘forget artificial intelligence for board games.’
During a four hour finale of a popular Chinese reality show, while 500 people from an audience deliberated on their winner, Alibaba’s Aliyun – or Alibaba Cloud, used its AI program to predict winners and finalists, with perfect accuracy. The Alibaba Ai team had been working around the clock to train the program, with a last-effort push after it tested Ai on April 1 during the previous “I Am a Singer” episode, said Min Wanlin, director of the Big Data Incubator at Aliyun. In that test, Ai correctly predicted the top one and two slots, but failed on the third-place winner.
This isn’t the only time Alibaba has tested it’s AI capabilities – it has previously used its artificial intelligence platforms for predicting traffic, helping with customer service and much more. “Unlike AlphaGo, which follows very strict rules, there are no ground rules with music and art,” Dr. Min told China Real Time, referring to the Google computer software that has made headlines for its prowess at the ancient Chinese game of Go. “We had to train AI to understand emotion and music.”
Dr. Min’s team has been working on AI since 2012. Going forward, Dr. Min said Aliyun is looking to offer AI services on demand. The company is currently working on a variety of AI projects, including a smart-home meter that can coordinate temperature and humidity in homes. The significance of AI predicting emotions and music brings a new dimension to an industry that had previously only attacked logic. It can easily be said – AI is making tremendous progress in 2016.