Artificial intelligence is now smarter—and it’s here

Mind AI founder Paul Lee comes to town with next-level AI in tow

There’s a new K-drama in town and it’s real, happening in real time. It is a bit more like sci-fi, though it’s no way like The Silent Sea or Memories of Alhambra. It’s more like SF8 or My Holo Love or Are You Human? But it’s more everyday reality, only it’s bound to get better.

Artificial intelligence or AI is nothing new. It dates back to 1935, when British logician and computer pioneer Alan Turing came up with something simply known as the universal Turing machine, an abstract computing machine that consists, as Britannica describes it, “of a limitless memory and a scanner that moves back and forth through the memory, symbol by symbol, reading what it finds and writing further symbols.”

It took a while to get it to work based on the premise that intelligence in computers could be achieved by rote learning. The machines would respond to commands but did not have any means to store, remember, and process the commands and their corresponding response.

In a span of only decades, despite the lack of government support and public hype, AI has grown by leaps and bounds. What would have been magical only a few years ago—such as our smartphones reminding us of our flight details or our offices taking note of our attendance by way of facial recognition or a date app helping us find The One—now seems so ordinary.

But wait! To this day, notwithstanding its many breakthroughs, AI is still considered the next big thing. Its potential has yet to be fully unleashed to present to us its truly transformative gifts.

Enter Paul Lee.

A molecular and cellular biochemist by education, he has completed the degree at St. Paul’s School and University of Oxford, as well as an M.D. from The School of Medicine at Catholic University of Korea. Paul is a scientist as much as he is an entrepreneur and an advocate of technology for the people. A co-founder at Synesis One, the world’s first decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) for data yield farming and a non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace for AI, he is also the founder and CEO of Mind AI, a relatively new company that’s taking artificial intelligence to the next level.

Paul, who cofounded JNP LAB in Seoul that acts as a development hub for global exponential technologies, was in town recently to establish Mind AI in the Philippines. Welcoming his arrival in Manila was a small, informal, al fresco dinner at Manila House Private Members Club with some of the people, Filipinos and foreigners, in the country who are themselves making great strides into the future.

What Mind AI is, according to Paul, is an artificial intelligence engine and an ecosystem created to offer an entirely new approach to AI. It is built on a core reasoning engine based on an internationally patented, completely new data structure called a canonical. A canonical is formed when the AI connects nodes and links, which are interchangeable, to enable itself to perform inductive, deductive, and abductive reasoning. These three methods of reasoning are pretty much how the human mind understands the world—by discovery (inductive), with the guidance of universal, general, or widely accepted facts or premises (deduction), and by logical assumptions made from information available (abductive).

‘When people think of artificial intelligence, they focus on the artificial part, not the intelligence part.’

“When people think of artificial intelligence, they focus on the artificial part, not the intelligence part,” explained Paul when asked to give the lowdown on Mind AI. “Intelligence requires a reasoning process and the reasoning process, in a nutshell, consists of three things—induction, deduction, and abduction. Now, putting those three things into an algorithm so that machines could understand and think like a human being was hard, close to impossible, took us 13 years. Now, we got a commercial product. Now, hence, companies are using it. It’s no longer just a lab experiment. It’s actually out there. It’s usable. And it can be in any language, whether Korean or Chinese or Tagalog… so we’re very happy to expand in this country.”

At its most basic, Mind AI is going to make communication between man and machine more conversational—and therefore more productive. Not only is Mind AI able to decipher contexts, make connections, draw logical conclusions, and generate intelligent responses, it also learns adaptively, designed as it is to grow smarter in use. Partnered with Synesis One, with which the company gamifies AI training, it’s bound to learn more from information crowdsourced via an ecosystem of data contributors, data traders, and data consumers.

“It’s very exciting for us because we literally just opened the company a couple of months ago. We knew nothing about the Philippines and we needed someone on the ground who knew the scenery, who knew the people so that we could get strategic partnerships and, you know, navigate inside this country,” said Paul at the beginning of the three-course dinner, introducing Mitchell Park, who now heads the Manila operations of Mind AI.

AI sure will change the world as much as electricity has, but Mind AI has anchored itself on three simple aims—to be an innovative, democratic, and helpful brand. At its heart is the desire to make AI accessible to all as well as transparent in its operations and decision-making, to use AI to make life easier for humans, so they can focus on more noble or gainful pursuits.