Alibaba’s AI predicts all the finalists and winner of hit Chinese singing show

Friday night was a big moment for Alibaba, when the company’s artificial intelligence made its public debut. It wasn’t at a university or a tech conference — it was as the super-judge on the popular Chinese reality singing show I’m a Singer.

Based on analyses of social media chatter, song popularity, the singers’ abilities, and more, the AI — named Ai — was able to accurately predict all of the show’s finalists and the grand winner.

A whole new board game

“We are very pleased with the Ai’s performance in achieving 100 percent accuracy in predicting the I’m a Singer competition’s results,” Dr. Min Wanli, Alibaba Cloud’s chief scientist for artificial intelligence, said in a statement following the show. Before working on Ai, Dr. Min was part of the research team behind IBM’s AI project, Watson.

“It is uncharted waters,”

“The results demonstrated that Ai is making significant progress to understand human emotions and how people make decisions,” he added.

There has been much comparison of Alibaba’s AI to Google’s AlphaGo, which recently bested the (former?) world champion of the Go board game, Lee Sedol. But Ai has less in common with AlphaGo than meets the eye.

The biggest distinction is that AlphaGo — like Deep Blue, the Kasparov-beating chess computer of the 1990s — is a tactical intelligence. Its goal is to outwit its human opponent by being able to think many steps ahead.

Ai, on the other hand, was tasked with a much squishier goal — to predict which singers a show’s judges would vote for. To accomplish this, the AI needed to evaluate everything from the crowd’s response to the popularity of the songs chosen by each contestant. And it nailed it.

“It is uncharted waters,” said Dr. Min. While predicting the results of a singing competition is far from a rigorous, scientific confirmation of the AI’s skills, it’s certainly an encouraging high-profile moment for Alibaba’s Ai.

This isn’t the last we’ll see of the Ai team — the ecommerce company has mentioned a bevy of potential applications for the technology, ranging from weather forecasts to assisting smart city infrastructure.

But something tells us this won’t be Ai’s only foray into show business. We eagerly await an all-AI version of Jeopardy.

[H/T: WSJ’s China Real Time blog]