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Alexa co-inventor William Tunstall-Pedoe gets 20 million for his AI startup that wants to break new ground in AI development.

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William Tunstall-Pedoe developed the AI assistant Evi, whose technology Amazon later used in Alexa. Amazon acquired the start-up of the same name in 2012. Tunstall-Pedoe then worked for Amazon until 2016 and led Alexa to market maturity with his team.

Tunstall-Pedoe founded a new AI start-up, Unlikely AI, back in 2018. Its only product to date is an AI-supported app that can solve complicated crossword puzzles using machine vision, among other things.

However, the startup also writes, "Most of our work has not yet been announced."

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$20 million investment for an alternative AGI approach?

Now Unlikely AI and Tunstall-Pedoe have resurfaced: The Cambridge and London-based startup is getting $20 million from venture capitalists. The backers include former Google CFO Patrick Pichette, who also sits on Twitter's board.

Tunstall-Pedoe is not revealing exactly what the investors are spending the money on. The investment is expected to go toward personnel who will develop a new type of AI software. Speaking to Bloomberg, Tunstall-Pedoe hints that his startup is exploring an alternative way to generalize AI - shifting away from scaling large AI models.

“Everyone is locked onto a path of machine learning with big neural networks,” Tunstall-Pedoe says. “It is very unclear that this path will lead to a generally intelligent machine. We are taking a contrarian fresh look at doing this.”

The scaling question

To what extent can AI progress be driven by scaling large AI models? This question is a recurring theme in AI research.

A recent survey of researchers working on natural language processing shows: Currently, only 17 percent of respondents believe that scaling can solve almost every important problem in NLP research. Seventy-two percent believe their field is too focused on scaling.

Recommendation

Metas AI Chief Yann LeCun sees scaling as an important factor in AI development, but it alone is not enough - the development of human-like AI needs additional ideas. Such systems would have to learn in a similar way to babies, for example.

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Summary
  • Alexa co-inventor William Tunstall-Pedoe founded the startup Unlikely AI in 2018.
  • Now he's receiving $20 million from investors.
  • He plans to use the money to hire specialists who will take a " contrarian, fresh look" at AI development - away from (merely) scaling large AI models.
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Online journalist Matthias is the co-founder and publisher of THE DECODER. He believes that artificial intelligence will fundamentally change the relationship between humans and computers.
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