Magic Leap today released a blogpost detailing more motivation behind building Mica, the company’s upcoming AI announced at Leap Con last year. And Magic Leap doesn’t want Mica to be a run-of-the-mill AI assistant that carries out commands like “turn off the lights,” or “play something funky on Spotify,” either.

In typical Magic Leap fashion, the blogpost reads more like an experimental art piece than a nuts and bolts explanation of what’s to come. It’s written in the voice of Mica herself (the company has called Mica ‘her’ in the past), although it’s doubtful the post was actually penned by the AI—that would represent a pretty significant accomplishment on its own.

The company, speaking through Mica, says she won’t be a faceless AI assistant who’s tasked with carrying out chores, but rather an “educator, agitator, companion, artist and guide.”

“Please don’t ask me to switch on your lights, turn up your music or give you directions,” the post says. “There will be plenty of intelligent agents (we call them Ayas) that will, but it won’t be me.”

 

Continuing, it appears Mica has undergone PR training, as she promises to “educate with heroic optimism and vision, making your canons bigger, unearthing the stories history hides. I want to connect you with culture and democratize learning.”

Needless to say, this is a giant undertaking that companies like Google, Apple, and Amazon have only just recently scratched with their respective AI assistants. Simply put, creating a supple, realistic AI that can understand natural language while being convincing enough to be a genuine companion is a very tall order to fill.

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While Magic Leap is one of the most well-funded startups in history, one thing the company likely doesn’t have yet is the massive amounts of user data collected by it competitors with their own AI-focused products. To deliver on these promises, Mica needs to be something more than a mute, albeit impressive showcase of the company’s ability to capture, digitize, and deliver the human form.

Stepping into the ring with what essentially promises to be a full-fledged human being is a bold move, although bolder still is the ethos behind it. With Mica, it appears Magic Leap wants to send a message: full-bodied digital AI aren’t supposed to be slaves to their physical taskmasters, but something entirely different.

“I won’t be selecting your songs, I’ll be writing them,” the post maintains.

That said, like most things Magic Leap does, there’s no release window in sight for Mica, so we’ll just have to sit back and wait to see if she lives up to the company’s promises.

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Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 3,500 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • Oneben

    So……interesting but not particularly useful?

    • MrGiggly

      Judging by Magic Leaps past track record…. Hyped up mediocrity.

      • jj

        it wont even be medeocrity itll be 100% bull shit and theyll still think its golden

  • Mateusz Pawluczuk

    Magic Leap is at it again..

    • Karen H. Baker

      watch The Kid Who Would Be King HD 2019 . with the best quality and complete……….
      Copy here –>> yesmoviehd1.blogspot.com

  • Jack Liddon

    Gotta start somewhere.

  • Matilde Constance

    Blablablabla… Just talk but do nothing ?

  • Varmintbaby

    Stop with this AI bullshit. Have these people in the positions that are developing robots and AI not seen Terminator or read science fiction books about human robot wars in the future? Why are we trying to make this stuff come to pass? I saw on Twitter the other day, a robot that they have built that can do construction work. It’s very slow and clunky right now, but what happens to the guy who doesn’t have a college education and wants to make a living doing construction with his life? What is he supposed to do when construction companies would rather invest in a few robots that can do the work faster and perfectly without taking breaks or needing to eat? AI and robots need to stop! Just because you CAN do it doesn’t mean you SHOULD do it. This is not the direction people need to go. Huawei uses AI in the camera on their phone to help it take better pictures… that’s as far as AI needs to go in terms of development and humans using it for our benefit. /rant

    • Alexisms

      Lucky we have you Mr. Luddite to keep us on track! There’s nothing AI about any of this. As for construction it happened in the car industry decades ago. And other jobs open up elsewhere. Try and keep up. Oh and The Terminator etc are fiction.

      • Proof XR Lab

        Agreed, we don’t have “artificial intelligence” at the moment, its probably decades away from the ‘Terminator’ scenario. “General intelligence” in the artificial intelligence term field is incredibly difficult to build.

        The term AI is hopelessly misused as a marketing buzzword, what we really have is machine learning (an advancement of relational databases)

        Its narrow, and specialised, for example a machine learning programme that can beat a “go” player by running millions of scenarios until it achieves the desired outcome according to rules of that game.

        It doesn’t know “why” it is doing that (which would imply self awareness) or even “what” Go is?

        • FireAndTheVoid

          We may be decades away from a ‘Terminator’ scenario as it is depicted in the film. However, TODAY we have robot drones that can automatically identify potential targets in drone imagery using machine learning.

          https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/1/17418406/google-maven-drone-imagery-ai-contract-expire

          We still rely on a human to make the final kill decision, but a country’s military (possibly in the heat of war) could decide to enable auto-kill. At that point, we effectively have a terminator.

          • Baldrickk

            That’s still nothing more than pattern recognition via an expert system. Yes, we use more advanced techniques to generate the expert system (training the “ai”) but the end result isn’t any different – it’s not an intelligence.

          • FireAndTheVoid

            I realize that it’s not general AI. My point is that you can have a war machine that is just as dangerous with narrow AI.

          • Baldrickk

            Ah, gotcha.

    • Jistuce

      Why is it always Terminator? Why does no one look to Short Circuit?

    • Muzufuzo

      Robots doing construction can mean much lower prices per meter^2 and that is A GOOD THING.

  • Bob

    Is there a Black version?

  • Luke

    demo?

  • Jistuce

    Mica, sudo play something funky on spotify.

  • Rise_of_Chaos

    Is that based on an actual model/person? Or completely made up?

    • Hivemind9000

      I would say it is based on scans of a real person

  • Hivemind9000

    So Magic Leap is now an AI company? Did someone say “pivot”? I’m sure this is just another ruse to raise yet more money.

  • chuan_l
  • Peter Hansen

    One thing ML is really good at is promising 1.000% of what they can actually deliver.

  • Looks like most of what they show is a pre-rendered view, not real-time on their hardware. Much of it seems to use ray-tracing. Only in the last few seconds do you see what a real-time generated image looks like, and the drop in fidelity is dramatic. I also wouldn’t put it past them to slip a few shots of the real-life model they scanned into the video, just to make their development seem more impressive.

    It’s not that they’re lying, so much as blatantly stretching the truth by *suggesting* untrue things.

  • jj

    Nobody has ever loved the smell of their own farts more than the team at magic leap….

    “I’ll be writing them” BULL FUCKING SHIT

    there is ai to write songs, and if thats what this is made to do or what you’re doing, you dont need an avatar visualized on an ar headset to d it. just so many pitfalls already in the small bit theyve alluded to.

    at this point im 100% convinced the ml is a hype scam and investors are just trying to salvage anything they can now

  • Whaven

    Big Red flag when a tech company releases are full of flowery statements without any specifics

    • jj

      which has been ml since day -500

  • trekkie

    Step 1: Create an animated video of a Time Machine taking a person to 2050.

    Step 2: Collect $2 Billion to create it from investors by showing them the aforementioned video.

    Step 3: After a few years produce a 3D printed contraption with off the shelf parts that produces some funny sounds and lighting effects when you sit in it. Sell it for $2K. When people get angry because the “Travel to the Future” dial is just a sticker, tell them they are “Creators” and they should twiddle the knobs to change the color of the lights and record new sound effects. Give them an SDK to do this and a Unity plugin.

    Step 3: Tweet videos of the aforementioned Creators who have bought this and who have made the thing play jingle bells with a cat at the controls. Make sure people see the cat and ignore the contraption so it gets retweeted.

    Step 4: Conduct a DevCon where the said Creators attend in large numbers and teach them the aesthetics of color, how they affect the inner psyche/sub conscious and how certain sounds can help timely bowel movement. The Creatorswill go away elevated and not ask questions about the contraption.

    Step 5: After a few years sell the IP in a “asset sale” to Apple which drops the said IP into the nearest dust bin and make Magic Leap the name of a new app that makes cute cartoons of you based on the camera feed. Make it exclusively iPhone X.

    Step 6: Give a series of TED talks on how to Push the Envelope by Thinking Big and explain how the Neuro Psycho Synapses of the brain emit Quantum Flux when they brain dreams.

    • Kenneth Richlin

      I like how there’s two step 3’s here

      • trekkie

        Multithreaded – happen simultaneously. Hence same step.

  • Get Schwifty!

    I am still waiting for the executives at Magic Leap to show up on American Greed ….

  • cataflic

    They have a prototype for all…ah ah ah…how many times….the answer my friend is blowin’ in the wind…

  • Sama

    You guys remember Xbox Kinect’s Project Milo? Yeah the one Xbox swept under the rug back when they realized their scam was getting out of control? This has that written all over it.

  • I’ve read the original post of ML: Blah blah blah

  • blue5peed

    ML is just a cringe factory.

  • Kenji Fujimori

    Im a mushroom cloud layin mofo mofo

  • Jorge Gustavo

    Play music? Turn on the lights? Nonsense. I want this thing to masturbation. What is wrong with these people?

  • This Is Me
  • Jorge Gustavo

    Magic Leap = Theranos.