The future of live video could be a personalized stream of content, automatically aggregated from all around the world. If you want to watch snowboarding, turn on your custom snowboarding channel.
But that requires an artificial intelligence algorithm that can watch videos, figure out what's happening, and determine whether you would like it. Researchers at Facebook have been exploring this idea, but it turns out Twitter may be further along. In a demo to MIT Technology Review, Twitter demonstrated the ability to classify (figure out what was happening within) two dozen live Periscope videos simultaneously.
This work is being done by Cortex, Twitter's machine-learning arm.
The classification of objects isn't incredibly precise; right now the best known systems in the world can determine breeds of dogs, and Facebook's can detect faces. But mostly, the tags Twitter can handle are general ones, like "cat" and "bird." So if you're an animal lover, you might be the first to witness this side of artificial intelligence.
Twitter's A.I. isn't inside any of its products yet, but it's being now tested on Periscope, the livestreaming company Twitter bought in January 2015.
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