Digital Sky Technology CEO Sees Facebook as Future Platform for Artificial Intelligence

By Tracey E. Schelmetic

TMCnet Contributor

 

The CEO of Russian venture capital company Digital Sky Technologies (DST) believes that Facebook (News - Alert) could be one of the early platforms for artificial intelligence sometime in the next 10 years.

Maybe you're surprised to see the words "Facebook" and "intelligence" in the same sentence.

According to Mashable, however, during a conversation between DST CEO Yuri Milner and Federated Media CEO and technology journalist John Battelle, Milner indicated that Facebook is the type of company that could "fundamentally change the way information is processed," and indicated that this is one of the reasons that DST chose to invest so heavily in Facebook. 

Mashable, while doubting the 10-year timeline as a tad too ambitious, comments that it's not hard to see why Milner says Facebook may end up being a trailblazer in artificial intelligence. "Facebook is the central nexus of social data and the social graph; it is the online personification of personalities, interests, friendships and more. Eventually we can see companies tapping into Facebook's API to augment their AI efforts and use that data to link AIs to the rest of the world."

Digital Sky Technologies is a Moscow-based investment firm that has famously taken stakes in some of the newest rising stars: both Facebook and Chicago-based Groupon, the deal-of-the-day group discount site. DST has also been said to be flirting with a large investment in Twitter.

Federated Media CEO John Battelle is a journalist and one of the founders of both Wired magazine and The Industry Standard. Since 2004, Battelle has been the co-moderator, along with Tim O'Reilly, of the annual Web 2.0 Summit. In 2005, he published "The Search: How Google (News - Alert) and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture," a book that tracks the development and rise of online search engines and, specifically, Google.