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. Read more...