Digital bytes

Facebook, Google plan AI takeover

Is it Skynet? No, it’s the future.

Tech giants Google and Facebook are both dedicating substantial resources to artificial intelligence.

The social networking site recently partnered with New York University’s Center for Data Science to research data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg hired Yann LeCun, a NYU professor of computer and neural sciences, to be the director of Facebook’s AI Group. LeCun posted about his new gig and the new laboratory on Facebook and Google+.

LeCun claims the new group will have teams in multiple offices, including New York, London and Menlo Park, Calif. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg commented on the social network’s interest in AI during an earnings call in October: “The goal here is to use new approaches in AI to help make sense of all the content that people share so we can generate new insights.”

Facebook’s millions of users are actively sharing their personal information with the social network every time they interact with it. AI could play a key role in deciphering this data.

Facebook routinely discusses its goal of putting the right content in front of the right people. Artificial intelligence could help the company to achieve better results for targeted ads and news feed improvements.

Facebook isn’t the only tech company pouring resources into artificial intelligence. Earlier this year, Google hired Ray Kurzweil, one of the top scientists in the field, and a proponent of “hard AI” – the idea that it is possible to create consciousness in an artificial being. Add that to Google’s ongoing quest to develop an artificial brain, and you either get a little excited or concerned, depending on how you feel about robots that think for themselves.

In 1999, Kurzweil predicted that in a decade, self-driving cars and mobile phones that can answer your questions would exist. His predictions were dismissed as the unrealistic proclamations of a futurist, but Google hopes he will apply the same kind of vision to help the search engine giant stay at the forefront of the tech world. – Matt McClellan

Social media faux pas

Many business owners know better than to just share posts about their products and specials on social media websites. But one new study conducted in the UK has revealed another annoyance for consumers — spelling and grammar. Disruptive Communications surveyed more than 1,000 UK consumers on “what was most likely to damage their opinion of a brand in social media,” and 42.5 percent chose poor spelling or grammar, making it the chief complaint. (They also weren’t fans of abbreviations that have become popular in texts.) Coming in second was “Updates are too ‘salesy’” at 24.9 percent, followed by “posts updates too often,” “trying too hard to be funny” and “does not post updates often enough.”

The gripes vary, however, when examining different age groups. The 18- to 24-year-olds want to hear more from their favorite companies, citing “Does not post updates often enough” as their chief complaint at 22.1 percent. Meanwhile, 31.3 percent of 45- to 54-year-olds said companies that were too promotional in their posts was their main pet peeve.

Source: Disruptive Communications

Brands get bank from Pinterest

Piqora, a marketing and analytics firm, analyzed hundreds of brands on Pinterest for nine months last year and found that, on average, a Pin generates 78 cents in sales. This is up by 25 percent from Q4 2012.

Other key stats from the research:

• On average a Pin drives two site visits and six page views
• On average, a Pinterest Pin generates more than 10 Repins – Pins are 100 times more viral than tweets, which on average only get retweeted 1.4 percent.

For more: www.piqora.com