This AI can read whole sentences, in any language

Artificial intelligence (AI) is not yet what its pioneers imagined or what its detractors fear. At the moment it is no more than a branch of computational statistics, which looks for correlations in large vats of digital data through brute force processing guided by algorithms. That it is producing useful findings and outputs is not in question. Most of the apps we use would not exist without it. But at times it feels as if only Ray Kurzweil is keeping alive the dream of building an artificial mind. So it is refreshing to encounter a data scientist inspired by neuroscience. Francisco Webber, co-founder and CEO of Cortical.io told Dominic Hobson how banks and insurers are using his firm’s technology to read unstructured data such as emails and contracts.