Structure News: A sad and amazing week in the world of artificial intelligence

Where We're Seeing An AI Spring January 29th, 2016 / by Tom Krazit This week, we'll talk about another great quarter for AWS sales, a startup incubator for enterprise technology, and two events that shook the artificial intelligence community this week. STRUCTURE NEWS THE STRUCTURE SHOW: AN AI LEGEND, TWITTER'S DILEMMA, MICROSOFT'S RESEARCH On this week's podcast we had the sad but inspiring task of summing up the contributions of MIT's Marvin Minsky to the field of artificial intelligence after his death this week (more on that in a bit). We also wondered if Twitter is heading for a Foursquare-like plan to license more of its data, and how research works -- and used to work -- in the tech industry amid a shift in thinking at Microsoft. If you haven't registered for Structure Data yet, today is a good day to do it: prices go up at midnight of the 29th. Scheduled for March 9th and 10th at UCSF Mission Bay, Structure Data will feature some of the best and brightest minds in data, AI, and deep learning as well as a bunch of interesting startups tackling these challenges. You can find more information here, and register here.   INDUSTRY NEWS AMAZON WEB SERVICES BRINGS IN $2.4B IN REVENUE IN Q4 2015, UP 69 PERCENT OVER LAST YEAR AWS continues to show that its lead in the cloud market shows no signs of slipping. Venturebeat reported that revenue was up 69 percent in the fourth quarter to $2.4 billion, which isn't as strong year-to-year growth as the last quarter, but that's still a number that will make AWS smile, especially seeing its stock get pummeled by profits that missed expectations on holiday sales weakness. WHY AMAZON'S CLOUD NUMBERS MAY BE THE ONLY ONES THAT COUNT Speaking of Amazon, until other big software companies start reporting cloud-based financial numbers in its style, it's probably best to take those numbers with a grain of salt. In a prescient post ahead of earnings week, Fortune notes that older tech companies like HP and Oracle love to talk about how much money they're making from cloud, just without disclosing pesky things like specific numbers. HELL, HIGH WATER, AND ICE: FACEBOOK'S DUBLIN DATA CENTER CHOICES Facebook announced plans to build a new data center in Dublin, Ireland, that will draw all of its power from renewable energy, according to the company. The Register takes a look at how the $200 million project came to be. "ENTERPRISE IS SEXY:" WHY ALCHEMIST THINKS IT CAN BECOME THE Y COMBINATOR FOR BORING STARTUPS "Boring" is a strange word to use kicking off a long piece about a huge market opportunity, but this is still a good look from Recode at Alchemist, an incubator for enterprise tech companies. Consumer-facing apps may get all the hype, but they simply wouldn't work without a lot of enterprise tech startups helping them along. THOSE VMWARE CUTS HIT MONDAY We all knew this was coming when Dell and EMC reached an agreement to join forces, but VMware confirmed this week it laid off 800 employees in a bid to cut costs before its parent company gets swallowed by Dell. Fortune reported that members of the company's vCloud Air teams took a hit, as well as groups working on VMware Fusion.   BIG PICTURE Go is a fascinating game. It's easy to learn and damn-near impossible to master, and has been entertaining people for thousands of years. But while we've long had the ability to beat grand masters in chess with our computers, nobody had beaten a Go champion with an artificial intelligence system. Until now. Google announced this week that its DeepMind team had managed to beat the European champion of Go in a matchup that recalled previous computer-versus-human competitions, such as Deep Blue versus Garry Kasparov. Wired has a good look at the effort that went into creating the system that managed to win a game that had frustrated AI researchers for years. (Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, in a humorous or maybe pre-mediated move, posted about Facebook's work chasing this goal just hours before Google made its announcement.) And after reading so many profiles of Marvin Minsky over the course of the week (Steven Levy of Backchannel has a good one), one thing that struck me was the distance between the development of his theories and DeepMind's accomplishment: nearly 60 years and untold advances in technology Minksy could not have forseen when he first got started. AI researchers know to be wary of "the AI winters" that can often follow a period in which public excitement in artificial intelligence has been growing, such as the one we're in now. And Minsky's life and legacy underscore that artificial intelligence research has produced amazing breakthroughs, but it has taken a very long time, and will continue to take a very long time by the standards of most other things in technology. The real test for DeepMind will come later this year, some time around Structure Data in March, when it faces off against South Korea's Lee Sedel, widely considered one of the best to ever play the game. But it's only the latest milestone in the long history of AI research that paved the way to Google's accomplishment. (Image courtesy Flickr user Reilly Butler/Creative Commons)       DISCOVER MORE   Click here to unsubscribe from this list. Our mailing address is: Structure 405 El Camino Real, #215 Menlo Park, CA 94025 Add us to your address book Copyright (C) 2016 Structure All rights reserved. Forward this email to a friend. Update your profile.