Who is the artificial intelligence company that accurately predicted that Leo would win an Oscar?

On March 1, Leo finally won the Best Actor award yesterday after being nominated for the Oscar for the fifth time, becoming one of the biggest topics of this year's Oscars. However, before that, artificial intelligence company Unanimous AI predicted the winners of six major awards, including the Best Actor award. Three of them were correct, with a 50% accuracy rate.

Unanimous AI company successfully predicted that Leo would win an Oscar

Leo finally wins Oscar

Unanimous AI predicted the following three awards for this year’s Oscars.

Leonardo DiCaprio won Best Actor for "The Revenant."

Brie Larson wins Best Actress for "Room"

——AG Iárritu won the Best Director award for "The Revenant".

In addition, in the previous Super Bowl, the company's predictions exceeded 99% of the people who participated in the bet. How did Unanimous AI achieve such a high hit rate?

“Swarm Intelligence”

Unlike Google, Facebook and other companies that simply develop technologies that can think like humans, Unanimous AI is researching "swarm intelligence," which means that a group of people form a collective and use their insights and intuition to defeat computers and individual experts.

UNU predicts best actor at the Oscars

Unanimous AI's CEO is Dr. Louis Rosenberg, who has worked at Stanford University on robotics, virtual reality, human-computer interaction, and more. Previously, in the 1990s, he developed the first immersive augmented reality system for the U.S. Air Force and founded MicroScribe, a virtual reality and 3D scanner company. During his research, Dr. Rosenberg discovered that studying collective behavior is more interesting than individual behavior. Just like birds and bees, fish and ants in nature. These species have formed their own social groups and worked together to develop their own closed-loop systems to amplify their intelligence.

As an old Chinese proverb goes, “Three heads are better than one.” These natural systems enable groups to combine their insights so that when it comes to problem solving and decision making, they can go beyond the wisdom of an individual. For example, bees use their collective wisdom to make the best decision about the location of their hive. Each bee has its own “specialty” job, and through this collective wisdom, they make the best decisions up to 80% of the time. Scientists call this behavior “swarm intelligence.”

What about us humans? Obviously, we lack the natural ability to form a closed-loop swarm, and like many other skills, we don’t do it naturally. But Dr. Rosenberg’s research shows that humans can function like bees.

Therefore, Unanimous AI's technology is not to study artificial intelligence that can replace humans, but to make humans smarter.

UNU Platform

To bring people together, we first need a social platform, and the UNU software platform under Unanimous AI came into being. On this platform, friends, colleagues and even strangers can gather together and answer questions as a group. Through specific technologies, these answers are aggregated to make the most accurate predictions.

UNU prediction dynamic chart

The whole prediction process is as follows. The researchers ask the group questions, and the participants drag their own answers to the circle in the middle within a limited time (30 seconds or 1 minute). Each person's answer will slightly change the direction of the circle. Another key is that everyone can change and switch their choices. By observing the direction of the circle and constantly negotiating with the group, a consensus is finally reached.

UNU predicts future US president

The interface used by Unanimous AI is a bit like a Ouija board, which uses the "power" of the crowd to push the pointer to a specific position.

How well does this work? UNU had an example. They got 50 people who had no experience doing this before to predict the winner of the Oscars. These people first made predictions individually. The average accuracy was 6 out of 15. The experts were accurate 9 out of 15. But the collective predictions were 11 out of 15. That means the average individual predictions went from 40% to 70% for the collective decision. The reason for this big improvement is that these people made up for each other's lack of knowledge.

Previously, Hawking and Musk had warned that artificial intelligence would destroy humanity. However, the "swarm intelligence" technology developed by Unanimous AI will be smarter than ourselves and can also incorporate human values ​​and emotions. If it can be used in business decision-making, medical diagnosis and treatment, and technology research and development in the future, this "swarm intelligence" will play a greater role.

So, how smart can "swarm intelligence" be? This probably needs further research by scientists and developers. After all, there are billions of people in the world, and each of them has unique ideas and insights. For "swarm intelligence", how to integrate these ideas is indeed a difficult problem. But I believe that "swarm intelligence" will be one step ahead of pure robots studied in artificial intelligence laboratories around the world.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.