Ben Medlock, co-founder and CTO of SwiftKey, discusses the limitations of 2015 artificial intelligence compared to human intelligence at Data Driven NYC.
“This is what the human brain does so incredibly well, and what our technology today is currently almost entirely unable to do.”
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More from Ben Medlock
Insight
Ben Medlock: Touchscreen typing is an inference problem, not a mechanical one
“This is a virtual keyboard, and the problem of typing was now not a mechanical problem. It's an inference problem, and that means that there is a degree of uncertainty.”
Ben MedlockApr 2, 2015▶ 6:40Ben Medlock, SwiftKey // Building a Better Keyboard // Data Driven NYC (FirstMark Capital)
AssertionPartly supported
Medlock: SwiftKey is used on close to a billion devices worldwide
“We designed this in 2010, and it's now used on close to a billion devices worldwide.”
Ben MedlockApr 2, 2015▶ 7:42Ben Medlock, SwiftKey // Building a Better Keyboard // Data Driven NYC (FirstMark Capital)
Disclosure
Medlock: SwiftKey chose independent probability distributions over neural networks for tractability
“And we took the first one of these because it's a lot easier and a lot more tractable.”
Ben MedlockApr 2, 2015▶ 9:44Ben Medlock, SwiftKey // Building a Better Keyboard // Data Driven NYC (FirstMark Capital)
Insight
Medlock: N-gram models are extremely hard to beat in voice recognition
“If you've done anything in voice recognition, you will know that it's really, really hard to beat Ngram models.”
Ben MedlockApr 2, 2015▶ 11:10Ben Medlock, SwiftKey // Building a Better Keyboard // Data Driven NYC (FirstMark Capital)
Insight
Medlock: Neural network language models are a highly promising research avenue
“Another possibility is to move away from engrams and towards neural network-based language models, which is a really promising, ah, avenue of research at the moment.”
Ben MedlockApr 2, 2015▶ 11:49Ben Medlock, SwiftKey // Building a Better Keyboard // Data Driven NYC (FirstMark Capital)
Disclosure
SwiftKey scraped the entire public internet to train its language models
“We scraped all of the publicly available texts off the internet and dumped it into language specific buckets.”
Ben MedlockApr 2, 2015▶ 12:24Ben Medlock, SwiftKey // Building a Better Keyboard // Data Driven NYC (FirstMark Capital)
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