Big AI

Late last month, shares of Facebook, and then of Twitter, fell by 20%; while shares of Amazon continued upwards, on demand for its cloud computing. I am tempted to say that this is the moment when AI replaced social media as that which governs the world – though not yet the autonomous superhuman AI of the singularity, this is still just human organizations using AI to analyze big data.

In reality, that’s far too superficial an event to serve as the milestone for that change. The market goes up and down; if the whole tech sector crashed, would that mean that the alleged AI takeover was reversed?

Nonetheless, out of sight and hard to grasp, increasingly many big corporations and government departments are using increasingly sophisticated machine-learning techniques, provided by a few big tech companies – Google, Microsoft, Amazon in the west, and perhaps Alibaba and Tencent in China. This article from India briefly but vividly sketches the situation.