Microsoft Image AI Increases Accuracy To Rival Humans with new ‘Seeing AI’ app. Skynet just took a step closer to becoming a reality. If you don’t know what Skynet is, the word refers back to the hit movie, ‘Terminator,’ in which a computer network gains sentience (the ability to feel things) and decides to do away with the human race.
While Microsoft Image’s latest AI advances aren’t Skynet, their new and recent AI image description routine is so good that it’s scary.
Describing an image with accuracy is a challenging problem for a computer because of course, humans have a vast, rich body of experience to draw from when defining and ultimately describing what we see. Codifying that so a computer can draw on it has proven to be a daunting task.
It hasn’t stopped companies from trying, however. In 2016, Google was the first company to make a significant breakthrough, reporting that their AI could caption images nearly as well as humans, with a shocking 94 percent accuracy. This is big news.
In the words of Eric Boyd, the CVP of Azure AI:
“Image captioning is one of the hardest problems in AI. It represents not only understanding the objects in a scene but how they’re interacting and how to describe them.”
Now, Microsoft Image has upped the ante with their ‘Seeing AI’ app, built for visually impaired users, which creates a real-time, running narrative of the world around the person using the app. According to a recent Microsoft blog post, their new routine is nearly 99 percent accurate. The new app will make it easier than ever for visually impaired users to navigate the web.
This is big, exciting news, and, interestingly, the company is rushing the product to market. Beating a benchmark is one thing, but it remains to be seen how effective the new app will be. One thing’s for sure though, we’re anxious to find out, and also, possibly a shade nervous too.
