AI with No Internet Connection

AI, or artificial intelligence; are you bored of hearing about of it yet? Between the stock market and CEO keynotes, we can’t seem to get away from it. It promises to revolutionize everything around us.

- Sahil Malik

We’ll have robots mowing our lawns, artificial intelligence teachers teaching us on our tablet computers, etc. We’ve all seen those incredible demos, yet when I want to build something useful with it, it comes down to a hard choice of rote theoretical concepts that seem so far away from usable code, or a matter of calling APIs with a key and giving up all my data to some random company out there. Where’s that robot mowing my lawn?

The issue is that I don’t want to offer up the corpus of my data to some random service out there. Maybe it’s a data security or privacy issue, or maybe I need quicker response times. Maybe it’s a matter of ongoing cost, or maybe I just don’t have internet connectivity. For instance, wouldn’t it be nice if I could just ask questions of “my” email over a simple chat-based UI, without having to share my life history with Apple or Microsoft? What if I was taking up a new job, and the new job shared 50 pages of fine-print details with me? I have many questions. I must accept the offer within 24 hours, and I have so many questions. I wish I could just ask questions. Or what if I had lots and lots of old financial data, and I wanted to ask a simple question, like “What is this $58.76 expense about?” and my computer had the intelligence to OCR all my receipts, and answer my questions in simple English, like “This $58.76 receipt was for tolls on your trip to customer XYZ in city def”. Or maybe my lawn-mowing robot ran out of Wi-Fi range and needs to decide quickly if it’s okay to mow over the rabbit? For the record, it is never okay to do that.

I’ve seen all these demos, yet when I sit down to solve these basic problems, all these promises by all these magnificent companies fall short.

Why can’t I ask my computer such simple questions?