AI & Robotics

Join gaming leaders online at GamesBeat Summit Next this upcoming November 9-10. Learn more about what comes next.  Instacart today announced that it acquired Caper AI, a startup developing technologies to automate brick-and-mortar checkout experiences, for approximately $350 million in cash and stock. With the purchase, Instacart says that it aims to help retailers “unify in-store and online…

Enterprise data intelligence solution provider Alation Inc. has announced the acquisition of data insights and AI vendor, Lyngo Analytics. This deal will enable Alation to scale its data intelligence offerings, help companies to drive their data culture, and elevate the business user experience. Lyngo Analytics’ natural language interface enables users to ask simple, business-focused questions…

This week, Microsoft and Nvidia announced that they trained what they claim is one of the largest and most capable AI language models to date: Megatron-Turing Natural Language Generation (MT-NLP). MT-NLP contains 530 billion parameters — the parts of the model learned from historical data — and achieves leading accuracy in a broad set of tasks, including reading comprehension and natural…

A new survey conducted by Replicant found that nearly 80% of consumers indicated they would prefer to speak with a virtual agent or machine to avoid long hold times. Moreover, 57% of consumers would speak with conversational AI even if the hold time was only five minutes. Beyond consumers’ willingness to speak with AI, the survey found pervasive customer service problems, with 91% of consumers…