Aug 25 2016
Kimera Systems Inc. today announced its Nigel™ artificial general intelligence (AGI) technology became the first commercially deployable artificial intelligence technology to observe user behavior, comprehend context, and derive a common sense set of actions to apply under specific circumstances. This groundbreaking achievement in artificial intelligence comes decades before many experts believe it will be possible.
“The ability for machines to learn common sense through observation is one of the next ‘holy grails’ in artificial intelligence,” said Steve Ardire, advisor to AI startups including Kimera. “Billions of dollars have been invested in pursuit of common sense learning in AI, but no company has yet announced anything close to what Kimera just achieved. The ability to reach this milestone using smartphones is a strong indication that Nigel is both commercially deployable and scalable.”
Kimera’s engineers wanted to validate how the Nigel single algorithm AGI learns, so in the first test of the currently private beta, users were instructed to go to the movies with their Nigel-enabled smartphones. There was no special programming used on Nigel, only some guidance provided to beta testers, ensuring a fully unsupervised learning test for the technology. Nigel was able to observe that a movie theater is a type of location, and that people share common behaviors with respect to their phones when they visit this type of location. Through these observations, Nigel learned to proactively dim screens and silence smartphones when people enter a cinema.
As an artificial general intelligence technology, Nigel represents a new approach that fuses together a broad range of hard and soft sensor data, resulting in continuous observation, moment-to-moment contextual awareness and, soon, complete comprehension. Nigel applies what it understands to real-world situations, learning about each user’s goals and proactively offering assistance in achieving them.
Rather than rely upon a centralized “brain” or knowledge bank, Nigel learns through an ever-growing neural network with nodes that can extend to any type of connected device. Nigel is engineered to leverage the existing computing power on smartphones and can be easily scaled to very large user populations. As more people use Nigel-enabled apps and devices, Nigel’s understanding of concepts accelerates, allowing the technology to recognize user needs based on location, calendar and contact entries, time of day, environments, and more.
Kimera will soon be adding new users to Nigel’s closed beta. To become part of the beta test group, people are invited to register at: kimerasystems.com/nigel/beta-program/.