Published on the 23/11/2016 | Written by Newsdesk
‘BabyX’ leaves the lab and looks for a job as Soul Machines opens for business…
A new artificial intelligence business with the intriguing name of Soul Machines and which is seeking to build intelligent avatars has gotten off the ground following a successful Series A financing round led by Horizons Ventures with Iconiq Capital which has raised some US$7.5 million.
That cash is going to go towards delivering ‘a vision of humanising technology to create intelligent and emotionally responsive, human-like avatars that augment and enrich the user experience for customers and markets adopting Artificial Intelligence-based platforms’, the company said in a statement; sounds a lot like a good drive down uncanny valley, at this point in time. It also sounds like a solution looking for a problem at this early stage, which is not an uncommon situation in the technology space.
Soul Machines is built on the technology behind ‘BabyX’, an avatar created by the company’s founder and CEO Dr. Mark Sagar – a two time Oscar-winning scientist (yes, Oscar) – and his engineering research team at the Laboratory for Animate Technologies based in the Auckland Bioengineering Institute (ABI), University of Auckland.
Reading up a little on BabyX is fascinating; start by ‘imagining a machine that can laugh and cry, learn and dream, and can express its inner responses to how it perceives you to feel. It can express itself in a natural manner but also allows you to visualise the mental imagery emerging in its mind’. Creepy. Fascinating. Helped, or not helped, by this further description: ‘BabyX is an interactive animated virtual infant prototype. BabyX is a computer generated psychobiological simulation.’ Coming to an avatar near you, soon.
“Mark’s work on Baby X is leading the way in the development of a completely new interaction model between humans and machines,” said Phil Chen of Horizons Ventures. “With the rapid acceleration of intelligent assistants and productivity applications using deep learning techniques, Mark and his team provide an emotional and social reasoning platform to existing and developing intelligence in the AI industry.”
Chen joins Soul Machines as executive chairman; his credentials include early investments in disruptive AI technology including Apple’s SIRI, Waze and Spotify. New Zealand-based technology entrepreneur Greg Cross has also joined Soul Machines.
Sagar said the investment equips the engineering team to focus on “building core technology that will bring human life to technology that is intelligent, emotive and adaptive. Our goal is to define the user experience for AI systems and platforms.”
Be mindful, as BabyX grows up, of Stephen Hawking’s niggling worry that clever machines might be the end of us all. Right now, however, he’s just a really cute little critter.
