Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, agrees with me!

Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI and co-founder of DeepMind, said in a recent interview on Defining Intelligence with Seth Rosenberg on YouTube that Microsoft Copilot, and by extension, all AI assistants, must retain a memory of all their conversations. This echoes what I have been saying for over a year. An AI assistant needs to have an episodic persistent memory to remember important details from conversations potentially for years and even decades. As AI assistants gain the power of agency, as they indeed will, they must also retain memories of their interactions with other agents and the outcomes of their actions. 

We recognise that memory is a crucial component of human intelligence, and we have various medical definitions for different types of memory loss. ChatGPT currently has a relatively severe example of anterograde amnesia. OpenAI and Microsoft need to look at case-based reasoning, the branch of AI that has been handling episodic memory since the 1980s. Roger Schank's initial work on scripts laid the foundation for episodic memory management, which was then blended with ML techniques in the 1990s.

Clip from Defining Intelligence with Mustafa Suleyman

A workshop on Case-Based Reasoning and Large Language Model Synergies is being held next week in Mérida, Mexico, with the 32nd International Conference on Case-Based Reasoning (ICCBR 2024).

Game Development Boot Camp - Auckland

If you're a student in Auckland with an interest in game programming, you might want to attend the free Microsoft Game Development Boot Camp that is being held this weekend at The University of Auckland. There are prizes to be won! Full details of when and where can be found on the Bootcamp's website.

It's nice to be right

Back in February this year, and earlier in September 2011, I wrote a couple of blog articles titled "Are you selling technology or services?" These posts put forward my opinion that Apple's strategy of tightly integrating its hardware and software had a vital third component; namely the services that people used on their iDevices. I wrote that Amazon seemed to be adopting this approach with the launch of its Kindle Fire. The Software Engineering Services Blog posted last week a piece called "Suddenly everyone wants to follow Apple's integrated hardware-software model," which describes how Google,  Samsung and Microsoft are now also trying to follow Apple's lead  by offering a complete ecosystem of hardware, software and services. The blog post concludes by saying "Steve Jobs may be long gone, but his vision lives on and everyone suddenly wants a piece of it, but just because they each recognize the magic behind Apple's strategy doesn't mean each can successfully copy it or that the market will follow. And that is the real challenge these companies face." It's nice to make a prediction that comes true.

Kodak's first digital camera - 1975

In the week that Apple released the new iPad Mini and Microsoft released Windows 8 and its Surface tablet my colleague Bob Doran pointed me back to the future - 1975 to be precise. Steve Sasson, an engineer at Eastman Kodak, invented  the digital camera in December 1975. In a Kodak blog post written in 2007, before Kodak went bankrupt, Sasson explains how it was constructed: "It had a lens that we took from a used parts bin from the Super 8 movie camera production line downstairs from our little lab on the second floor in Bldg 4. On the side of our portable contraption, we shoehorned in a portable digital cassette instrumentation recorder. Add to that 16 nickel cadmium batteries, a highly temperamental new type of CCD imaging area array, an a/d converter implementation stolen from a digital voltmeter application, several dozen digital and analog circuits all wired together on approximately half a dozen circuit boards, and you have our interpretation of what a portable all electronic still camera might look like."
   We all become mesmerized by the new and the shiny but this reminds us that being first or being an established powerful company doesn't inevitably result in long term success. Sasson ends his post with, "The camera described in this report represents a first attempt demonstrating a photographic system which may, with improvements in technology, substantially impact the way pictures will be taken in the future.” - how did Kodak get it so wrong.

Thanks Mom

Mary and Bill Gates

I thought I knew the history of how Microsoft got the contract to make DOS for IBM. For some reason IBM and DEC were unable to agree terms for a contract for an operating system for IBM's new PC so IBM turned to Microsoft who bought QDOS from a Seattle company and rebranded it IBM DOS and licensed it to IBM. What didn't make sense though was why IBM would approach a tiny company, run by a college kid, making BASIC for a kit computer. Hardly the sort of company IBM usually did business with. Then over the holidays I read that Bill Gates' mother Mary was on the board of a company called United Way with John Opel the CEO of IBM. Opel allegedly told Mary IBM were looking for an operating system and she put her son Bill forward - "Thanks Mom"

Bill Gates arrested...

...in Albuquerque, New Mexico after a traffic violation in 1977. Here's his police mugshot.
Now the book's finished I thought I'd post some entertaining snippets from the book on the blog. I was looking for a public domain photo of the young Bill Gates - he was 22 in this photo. This photo is a "public record" under New Mexico law and hence is in the public domain. Micro-Soft (yes with a hyphen) was then based in Albuquerque to be close to MITS, which made the Altair kit computer for which Micro-Soft was making BASIC. The thing I love about this photo is how happy Gates looks. Is he thinking, "My father is a really wealthy lawyer." or, "I'm going to be the richest man in the world." Check out that shirt collar as well.