Tech companies such as Google, IBM and Microsoft have been busy tinkering with artificial intelligence for the past few years or so. Today, yet another company will be entering the AI space as Sony has partnered up with a startup to create the next generation of AIs.
According to a report by Reuters, Sony has made an investment into a U.S. start-up by the name of Cogitai. This year-old California-based firm, founded by three researchers, focuses on technology that allows machines to learn continually and autonomously from interaction in the real world. “It builds on everything that has come before. There’s supervised deep learning to distinguish objects and then there’s reinforcement learning because AI needs to act in the world and learned from consequences. But the new part is the ability to learn and build on those previous things,” says Dr. Sainder Singh, co-founder of Cogitai.
Sony isn’t exactly new to the AI business of course as the company has had experience with this sector of the industry thanks to both the AIBO and the QRIO robots that were developed in the early 2000s. The Japanese’s company’s partnership with a relatively inexperienced startup could be potentially beneficial to both parties as Cogitai could put their applications to practice while Sony can aid the startup in developing their next generation AI.
“From an objective perspective, we are lagging ehind. But there are still unexplored areas – some in cyberspace but vastly more in the physical world. And we have a number of products in the physical world. We make hardware. That’s our strength,” says Hiroaki Kitano, Chief Executive of Sony Computer Science Laboratories.
