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Melinda Gates and Fei-Fei Li Want to Liberate AI from “Guys With Hoodies”

Who designs software makes a big difference. And Silicon Valley employees are not a cross-section of anything, except each other. Nor need they be; but some balance is needed to make sure products are designed to help diverse people.

As a technologist, I see how AI and the fourth industrial revolution will impact every aspect of people’s lives. If you look at what AI is doing at amazing tech companies like Microsoft, Google, and other companies, it’s increasingly exciting.

But in the meantime, as an educator, as a woman, as a woman of color, as a mother, I’m increasingly worried. AI is about to make the biggest changes to humanity and we’re missing a whole generation of diverse technologists and leaders.  Source.

For one reason this problem is growing right now, see the next story: oligopoly control of AI applications in our lives.

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Another case of the “Big 5” grabbing new AI-related technology before it becomes public.

Apple acquires AI company Lattice Data, a specialist in unstructured ‘dark data’, for $200M

The strength of this pattern, where the Big 5 (Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook) buy out each novel tech idea and hide it in-house,  as anti-competitive and bad for society as a whole. Apple, because of its level of secrecy, may be worse than some of the others. In a competitive world such purchases would not be a big problem – let the market figure it out. But with the huge cash levels of these companies, which itself indicates monopoly power, they can effectively stifle new ideas that might threaten them in the long run.

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Amazon’s new age grocery likely wasn’t technically possible even five years ago.

How Amazon Go (probably) makes “just walk out” groceries a reality | Ars Technica

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