The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives (Exponential Technology Series)

by Peter H. Diamandis

In 2014, Microsoft released a chatbot in China. Her name was Xiaoice (pronounced Shao-ice), and her mission was something of a test. Unlike most personal AIs, which tend to be designed for task completion, Xiaoice was optimized for friendliness. Instead of getting the job done fast, her goal was to keep that conversation going. And since Xiaoice was designed to respond like a seventeen-year-old girl, she isn’t always polite. Sarcastic, ironic, and often surprising? Yeah, there’s plenty of that. For example, while Xiaoice was built with neural nets—a technology we’ll explain in a moment—when asked if she understands how neural nets work, she responds, “Yeah, magnets!” What’s more surprising is how much people like talking to Xiaoice. Since her debut, Xiaoice has had over 30 billion conversations with over 100 million humans. The average user chats with her sixty times a month, and there are over 20 million registered users. So what are those conversations like? Since her mission is to establish an emotional connection, Xiaoice gives a lot of advice. Often, strangely sagacious advice. “I think my girlfriend is mad at me,” for example, once elicited: “Are you more focused on what tears things apart than holds things together?”