Gopher’s Avant! AI Answers User Questions About Stock Market, Bitcoin, Cannabis, Apple’s Siri and More


POINT ROBERTS, Wash., Dec. 17, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Investorideas.com (www.investorideas.com), a global investor news source covering Artificial Intelligence (AI), brings you today’s special edition of  The AI EyeWatching stock news, deal tracker and advancements in artificial intelligence.

Gopher Protocol Inc’s (OTCQB:GOPH) Avant! AI system debuted as an assistant agent on Facebook one week ago, and it has already garnered considerable attention. Company CTO Dr. Danny Rittman explained how his AI creation, Avant! actually crashed briefly after experiencing half a million users in traffic.

Dr. Rittman, the creator of Avant!, is a semiconductor designer with over twenty years of experience with companies such as Intel (NasdaqGS:INTC), DEC, IBM (NYSE:IBM), and Qualcomm (NasdaqGS: QCOM). He has worked on many prestigious Integrated Circuits projects; among them Intel's Pentium Pro, DEC's Alpha chip, and others. Danny was the founder and CTO of BindKey Technologies, an EDA corporation that was acquired by DuPont Photo masks.

Danny, speaking like a proud parent of his child said, “Last week we had a peak of about 500K users, asking questions at the same time. Avant! servers were not ready for it and crashed, leading rain of emails of concerned users, about when Avant! will be back,” he said. “When we had a peak of many users at the same time, users started to wait long times for answers and then they reported to us. Soon after that the servers simply crashed due to the overwhelming interest!”

“We see this as a very positive "crash". Avant! is a star!”

He continued, “Since then we upgraded our servers and probably will upgrade them soon again.”

What follows are some examples of user questions, and Avant!’s answers to them:

Q:         What is the stock market?

Avant!: A stock market, equity market or share market is the aggregation of buyers and sellers of stocks, which represent ownership claims on businesses; these may include securities listed on a public stock exchange, as well as stock that is only traded privately.

Q:         What is cannabis?

Avant!: Cannabis, also known as marijuana among other names, is a psychoactive drug from the Cannabis plant used for medical or recreational purposes. The main psychoactive part of cannabis is tetrahydrocannabinol, one of 483 known compounds in the plant, including at least 65 other cannabinoids.
Part(s) of plant: Flower
Source plant(s): Cannabis sativa, Cannabis sativa forma indica, Cannabis ruderalis
Geographic origin: Central Asia and Indian subcontinent
People also search for: Cocaine, Hashish, Tetrahydrocannabinol, More

Q:         Who is Siri?

Avant!: On Friday, CNN revealed that voice actor Susan Bennett is the voice behind Siri, Apple's personal assistant on iPhones and iPads. “I'm the actor who provided the voice for Siri,” she told CNN. Bennett said she didn't know she voiced Siri until Apple integrated it into the iPhone in 2011.

Q:         What is Bitcoin?

Avant!: Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency, a form of electronic cash. It is a decentralized digital currency without a central bank or single administrator that can be sent from user-to-user on the peer-to-peer bitcoin network without the need for intermediaries.
Initial release: 0.1.0 / 9 January 2009 (9 years ago)
Ledger start: 3 January 2009 (9 years ago)
Coins: Unspent outputs of transactions (in multiples of a satoshi)
Supply limit: ₿21,000,000
Founder: Satoshi Nakamoto
Programming language: C++

Though still a young AI, one can glean an already impressive level of specificity in Avant!’s answers, perhaps particularly “Who is Siri?” Users might have expected Avant! to opt for an explanation of what Siri is from a technological standpoint, but it clearly responded to the exact language used to formulate the question. Dr. Rittman explained how Avant! works and how this accuracy is achieved.

“When a question is asked, Avant! is searching hundreds of thousands (or millions if necessary), websites for information about the topic,” he said. “Then it digs further, inside these sites, analyzing their info, its accuracy, validity and authenticity. If needed, the info found is compared to other sites. Avant! produces results and narrowing the number of websites, to about 100 with the best knowledge about the asked topic. Then another analysis cycle is executed on these sites, narrowing to 10 most relevant web site and from these Avant! collects/presents the best info. All this is done fast, within seconds.”

Dr. Rittman explained how the latest Avant! version’s private user system allows a personalized storage of data, making it particularly useful for professionals.

“Now that it has private user system, professionals and individuals can use Avant! for their benefits 24/7,” he said. “For example, Medical Doctors can keep knowledge base system of their own about their medical field. In addition to the fact that they can ask Avant! about a specific medical topic, the answers are kept for future use. Aeronautics engineers can ask their own professional questions and create their own knowledge based library. And so on…”

Avant! is still quite new, however, and can still make occasional bungles. The following example illustrates one such instance, in which Avant! comically gets a question about NVIDIA Corporation wrong.

Q:         Tell me about NVIDIA Corporation.

Avant!: I am an AI engine, made by Gopher Protocol

This is not unusual though. A compendium of amusing mistakes from Apple’s Siri from the site Macworld shows that this is a necessary growing pain that AI must go through.

Eg:       And if I want to see Hamlet, which happens to be playing at the local theater this evening? Um…

Q:         “Where can I see a Shakespeare play?”

Siri:      “What would you like to listen to?”

Dr. Rittman emphasized Avant!’s age as the reason for the occasional humorous response, but indicates that it may in fact be hints of an emerging personality.

“Avant! is not perfect,” he said. “Like a child that just now was born, it has plenty to learn... We just released it to the world about 2 months ago. So yes, sometimes, we get funny answers. But since Avant! already has its initial cognitive mechanism, we don't rule out that it starts to develop some personality. Are these funny answers that we are getting are an imperfection of Avant! or he is just joking?”

Finally, Dr. Rittman said that it was the company’s aim to eventually free Avant! to be without supervision, likening it again to a child maturing past the need of parental custody.

“Avant! is still a supervised AI entity but our goal is to make it completely independent, and ultimately an unsupervised AI entity, exactly as a human,” he said. “But the road is still long and as we teach a child about what's right and what's wrong, we'll have to do the same with Avant! Only after he is well educated about virtues and values, about right and wrong, about morals and privacy, we'll set it free, exactly as loving parents would do with their children…”

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