2014-11-14 It's Time to Take Artificial Intelligence Seriously - WSJ

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It's Time to Take Artificial IntelligenceSeriouslyNo Longer an Academic Curiosity, It Now Has Measurable Impact on OurLives

Aug. 24, 2014 7:24 p.m. ET

The age of intelligent machines has arrived—only they don't look at all like weexpected. Forget what you've seen in movies; this is no HAL from "2001: A SpaceOdyssey," and it's certainly not Scarlett Johansson's disembodied voice in "Her." It'smore akin to what happens when insects, or even fungi, do when they "think." (What,you didn't know that slime molds can solve mazes?)

Artificial intelligence has lately been transformed from an academic curiosity tosomething that has measurable impact on our lives. Google Inc. used it to increase theaccuracy of voice recognition in Android by 25%. The Associated Press is printingbusiness stories written by it. Facebook Inc. is toying with it as a way to improve therelevance of the posts it shows you.

What is especially interesting about this point in the history of AI is that it's no longerjust for technology companies. Startups are beginning to adapt it to problems where,at least to me, its applicability is genuinely surprising.

Take advertising copywriting. Could the "Mad Men" of Don Draper's day havepredicted that by the beginning of the next century, they would be replaced bymachines? Yet a company called Persado aims to do just that.

A still from "2001: A Space Odyssey" with Keir Dullea reflected in the lens of HAL's "eye." MGM / POLARIS /STANLEY KUBRICK

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2014-11-14 It's Time to Take Artificial Intelligence Seriously - WSJ

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Persado does one thing, and judging by its client list, which includes Citigroup Inc. andMotorola Mobility, it does it well. It writes advertising emails and "landing pages"(where you end up if you click on a link in one of those emails, or an ad).

Here's an example: Persado's engine is being used across all of the types of emails atop U.S. wireless carrier sends out when it wants to convince its customers to renewtheir contracts, upgrade to a better plan or otherwise spend money.

Traditionally, an advertising copywriter would pen these emails; perhaps the companywould test a few variants on a subset of its customers, to see which is best.

But Persado's software deconstructs advertisements into five components, includingemotion words, characteristics of the product, the "call to action" and even the positionof text and the images accompanying it. By recombining them in millions of ways andthen distilling their essential characteristics into eight or more test emails that are sentto some customers, Persado says it can effectively determine the best possible come­on.

"A creative person is good but random,"says Lawrence Whittle, head of sales atPersado. "We've taken the randomnessout by building an ontology of language."

The results speak for themselves: In thecase of emails intended to convincemobile subscribers to renew their plans,initial trials with Persado increased click­through rates by 195%, the companysays.

Here's another example of AI becominggenuinely useful: X.ai is a startup aimed, like Persado, at doing one thing exceptionallywell. In this case, it's scheduling meetings. X.ai's virtual assistant, Amy, isn't a websiteor an app; she's simply a "person" whom you cc: on emails to anyone with whom you'dlike to schedule a meeting. Her sole "interface" is emails she sends and receives—justlike a real assistant. Thus, you don't have to bother with back­and­forth emails trying tofind a convenient time and available place for lunch. Amy can correspond fluidly with

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2014-11-14 It's Time to Take Artificial Intelligence Seriously - WSJ

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anyone, but only on the subject of his or her calendar. This sounds like a simpleproblem to crack, but it isn't, because Amy must communicate with a human beingwho might not even know she's an AI, and she must do it flawlessly, says X.ai founderDennis Mortensen.

E­mail conversations with Amy are already quite smooth. Mr. Mortensen used her toschedule our meeting, naturally, and it worked even though I purposely threw in someambiguous language about the times I was available. But that is in part because Amyis still in the "training" stage, where anything she doesn't understand gets handed tohumans employed by X.ai.

It sounds like cheating, but every artificially intelligent system needs a body of data onwhich to "train" initially. For Persado, that body of data was text messages sent toprepaid cellphone customers in Europe, urging them to re­up their minutes or opt intospecial plans. For Amy, it's a race to get a body of 100,000 email meeting requests.Amusingly, engineers at X.ai thought about using one of the biggest public databaseof emails available, the Enron emails, but there is too much scheming in them to be agood sample.

Both of these systems, and others like them, work precisely because their makershave decided to tackle problems that are as narrowly defined as possible. Amy doesn'thave to have a conversation about the weather—just when and where you'd like toschedule a meeting. And Persado's system isn't going to come up with the next "JustDo It" campaign.

This is where some might object that the commercialized vision for AI isn't intelligent atall. But academics can't even agree on where the cutoff for "intelligence" is in livingthings, so the fact that these first steps toward economically useful artificial intelligencelie somewhere near the bottom of the spectrum of things that think shouldn't bother us.

We're also at a time when it seems that advances in the sheer power of computers willlead to AI that becomes progressively smarter. So­called deep­learning algorithmsallow machines to learn unsupervised, whereas both Persado and X.ai's systemsrequire training guided by humans.

Last year Google showed that its own deep­learning systems could learn to recognizea cat from millions of images scraped from the Internet, without ever being told what acat was in the first place. It's a parlor trick, but it isn't hard to see where this is going—the enhancement of the effectiveness of knowledge workers. Mr. Mortensen estimatesthere are 87 million of them in the world already, and they schedule 10 billion meetingsa year. As more tools tackling specific portions of their job become available, theirdays could be filled with the things that only humans can do, like creativity.

"I think the next Siri is not Siri; it's 100 companies like ours mashed into one," says Mr.Mortensen.

—Follow Christopher Mims on Twitter @Mims or write to him atchristopher.mims@wsj.com.

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Steven Haver

Whenever an editorial or news feature, on a highly­controversial topic, is printed ina broadly­circulated publication, the number of "reader comments" tends to behigh. Manually examining all such, to form an impression of the consensus, wouldtake more time than most readers can justify.

Most comments appear to be rational expressions of a coherent viewpoint (not tomention compliant with decency standards); sheer volume tends to be excessive.

AI might be able to perform such an examine all newly­submitted comments, forman opinion as to the consensus, and display this, along with the comments which itdeems most relevant. (Most likely, in a separate section; display of all submittedcomments which meet decency requirements should continue).

Charles Davis

"I think the next Siri is not Siri; it's 100 companies like ours mashed into one," saysMr. Mortensen.Or perhaps, put in a different way, 100 or 1000 agents each asynchronouslyhandling a multitude of tasks.Whether such a project can fully succeed is, I think, an empirical question. While itis certainly possible the AI project will run into a wall at some point in the future, it ispretty clear to me that huge progress has been made and that the game isaccelerating. Just as PC's transformed productivity, AI's will continue to enhanceand amplify human efforts in the future. It's just beginning.

Michael Wiggins

I'm ... sorry ... Dave ... you ... do ... not ... qualify ... for ... 50% ... off ... discounts ...at ..............

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2014-11-14 It's Time to Take Artificial Intelligence Seriously - WSJ

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