Allen Institute for AI or AI2 is the brainchild of the late Paul Allen, philanthropist, and Microsoft co-founder. Dr. Oren has also been a part of the organisation from its inception. Being a renowned expert in the field of AI and a serial entrepreneur, he has helped pioneer meta-search, online comparison shopping, machine reading, and Open Information Extraction. In an exclusive interview with Analytics India Magazine, Dr. Oren speaks about his journey in leading AI2, their mission to promote the use of AI for the Common Good, and the challenges that lay ahead for the AI community at large.
Professor Emeritus
Dr. Oren Etzioni is the founder of TrueMedia.org, a nonprofit fighting political deepfakes. He was the Founding Chief Executive Officer at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2), having served as CEO from its inception in 2013 until late 2022. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington where he helped to pioneer meta-search, online comparison shopping, machine reading, and open information extraction. He has authored several award-winning technical papers, achieving an H-index of 100 (100 technical papers each cited over 100 times). Finally, he is a technical director of the AI2 Incubator and a Venture Partner at Madrona. He has founded several companies including Farecast (acquired by Microsoft).
Videos
Startup Grind: An Interview with Oren Etzioni
Oren joins Mike Grabham at Startup Grind for an interview about what’s happening with AI today and what’s coming next.
Learning Common Sense: A Grand Challenge for Academic AI Research
Dr. Oren Etzioni, Chief Executive Officer of the Allen Institute for AI and professor of computer science at the University of Washington, addresses one of the Holy Grails of AI: acquiring, representing and utilizing common-sense knowledge, during a distinguished lecture series held at the Office of Naval Research.
Oren Etzioni on Demystifying Artificial Intelligence
Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute for AI, gave the keynote address at the winter meeting of the Government-University-Industry Research Roundtable (GUIRR) on “Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to Accelerate Translational Research”.
Stevens Institute of Technology: President’s Distinguished Lecture with Oren Etzioni
Does Artificial Intelligence (AI) research result in threats to society, or will it yield beneficial technology? The talk will address these issues by describing the projects and perspective at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2) in Seattle. AI2’s mission is “AI for the Common Good,” as exemplified by Semantic Scholar, a search engine that utilizes AI to overcome information overload in scientific search.
Moving Beyond the Turing Test with the Allen AI Science Challenge
This video discusses the paper: Moving Beyond the Turing Test with the Allen AI Science Challenge. The field of Artificial Intelligence has made great strides forward recently, for example AlphaGo’s recent victory against the world champion Lee Sedol in the game of Go, leading to great optimism about the field. But are we really moving towards smarter machines, or are these successes restricted to certain classes of problems, leaving other challenges untouched? In 2016, the Allen Institute for AI (AI2) ran the Allen AI Science Challenge, a competition to test machines on an ostensibly difficult task, namely answering 8th Grade science questions. Our motivations were to encourage the field to set its sights broader and higher by exploring a problem that appears to require modeling, reasoning, language understanding, and commonsense knowledge, to probe the state of the art on this task, and sow the seeds for possible future breakthroughs. The challenge received a strong response, with 780 teams from all over the world participating. What were the results? This article describes the competition and the interesting outcomes of the challenge.
AI FOR GOOD – The Future of Work
As computer automations is upon us and many jobs will change or be replaced by AIs, AI optimist Oren Etzioni, CEO, Allen Institute for AI, describes the social impacts we must consider as he paints a possible euphonic future state in which jobs will be more creative and fulfilling. About XPRIZE: XPRIZE is an educational (501c3) nonprofit organization whose mission is to bring about radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity, thereby inspiring the formation of new industries and the revitalization of markets that are currently stuck due to existing failures or a commonly held belief that a solution is not possible. XPRIZE addresses the world’s Grand Challenges by creating and managing large-scale, high-profile, incentivized prize competitions that stimulate investment in research and development worth far more than the prize itself. It motivates and inspires brilliant innovators from all disciplines to leverage their intellectual and financial capital.
What AI needs is a dose of realism
“I think what’s missing in the AI conversation is a dose of realism. We have on the one extreme people like Kurzweil, who are fantastically optimistic but don’t really have data to back up their wildly optimistic predictions. On the other hand, we have people who are very afraid, like Nick Bostrom, who’s a philosopher from Oxford, or Elon Musk, who needs no introduction, and say AI is like summoning the demon, which is really religious imagery. But again, neither party has the data to base their conclusions on; it’s wild extrapolations, it’s metaphor (like AI is a demon), it’s philosophical argumentation. I think we need to have a more measured approach, where we measure AI’s performance, where we understand that superhuman success on a narrow task like Go doesn’t translate to even human performance level on a broad range of tasks, the kind that people do. I like saying my six-year-old is a lot smarter than AlphaGo—he can cross the street, more or less.”
Artificial Intelligence will empower us, not exterminate us
Artificial Intelligence advocate Oren Etzioni makes a case for the life-saving benefits of AI used wisely to improve our way of life. Acknowledging growing fears about AI’s potential for abuse of power, he asks us to consider how to responsibly balance our desire for greater intelligence and autonomy with the risks inherent in this new and growing technology.
AI for the Common Good
Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute for AI, shares his vision for deploying AI technologies for the common good.
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