Alexa, what’s the future of digital assistants? I don’t how Alexa would answer that question. But looking at the number of top A.I. minds who have recently left big tech companies to create well-funded startups dedicated to building a new-breed of digital assistants aimed at being useful for business, a golden era of digital work companions is likely to be around the corner.
Among this new crop of digital startups is Adept AI Labs. The company, which emerged from “stealth mode” earlier this year with $65 million in initial venture capital funding, stands out for its founding team. They include a group of researchers from Google Brain who in 2017 invented the A.I. architecture known as “The Transformer.” This algorithmic design has underpinned a huge number of A.I. advances, especially in natural language processing, over the past five years. Now, the team that created the Transformer thinks the same basic idea can be used to create more capable, general assistants that will be able to work alongside people to help perform a wide range of business tasks.
“The problem we’ve carved out is how to get machine to collaborate with humans and actually build things for them,” says Ashish Vaswani, Adept’s co-founder and chief scientist. Vaswani was the lead author on the paper that introduced the Transformer. He says what Adept is building is not simply a better chat bot. “We want to figure out how to get machines to perform actions for people, not just have conversations with them.”