The most mysterious AI company at CES—Samsung Neon

Samsung's Neon company had a booth at the CES consumer electronics show on Sunday, but it didn't actually show off its technology. It also won't be part of Samsung's keynote on Monday.

CES 2020 has barely begun in Las Vegas, but everyone is talking about a mysterious new Samsung-backed venture: Neon.

The company has been posting teasers on Twitter over the past three weeks, hinting at new technology. "Have you seen AI in person?" Neon has tweeted several times since launching its Twitter account in December. Its LinkedIn page says it is "turning science fiction into reality" and is "on a mission to imagine and create a better future for all."

Little was known about Neon at CES, other than that it’s run by Pranav Mistry, a Samsung Research executive who was named CEO of Samsung’s Bay Area Technology and Advanced Research Labs (STAR ​​Labs) last October.

Mistry tweeted on Saturday two photos of what appear to be artificial humanoid avatars, which he called "R3 Cores." Unlisted videos were found on Reddit and compiled into a video by the Good Content tech page on YouTube, showing various other humanoid avatars that look a lot like real people.

“It can now automatically create new expressions, new actions, new dialogues (even in Hindi) completely different from the original captured data,” Mistry tweeted.

These hints have only served to make Neon more mysterious. Could it be a replacement for Samsung's Bixby smart digital assistant? (That theory was quickly debunked.) Will it appear on Samsung devices? Does this mean we'll soon be living in a real-life version of the HBO show Westworld?

Samsung watchers expect the company to reveal Neon's true identity during its CES keynote at 6:30 p.m. on Monday.

Although Neon was created by Samsung's research division, it is not part of the electronics giant, and they will not be able to get a demo of the Neon technology until Tuesday at the earliest.

Samsung is one of the tech giants that has been making a big push to make our devices smarter. The so-called Internet of Things encompasses the concept that everything around us should communicate and work together. The idea is to make life simpler, allowing us to close the garage door when we're out, or get a reminder from the fridge when we're running low on milk. But many of our devices still don't talk to each other, or at least they're often not as smart as promised.

The mystery grows

As companies like Google, Amazon, and Samsung have discovered, the key to making smart devices truly useful is embedding artificial intelligence, especially voice assistants. Every tech giant is investing in them because they portend how we will interact with devices in the future. The ultimate promise of smart technology is to predict what you want before you ask, or to make you forget that you are not communicating with a real person.

Two years ago, Samsung said it would invest $22 billion in artificial intelligence by 2020 and hire 1,000 AI experts by the same time. It has opened AI centers around the world to work on solving problems and making technology smarter.

Samsung showed off several robots at last year's CES that can do things like monitor health and help with mobility issues, and its robot Chef helps cook.

Most of Samsung's efforts in artificial intelligence have revolved around Bixby, which first appeared on the Galaxy S8 in 2017. Since then, the digital assistant has begun to appear in smart TVs, refrigerators, washing machines, air conditioners, speakers, and more. Samsung's previous goal was to bring Bixby voice control system to every device by 2020.

As with all the talk of connecting everything, Samsung seems to be falling short of that goal. Samsung declined to say how many of its devices are connected, saying only that "most" Samsung products are smart.

“AI will truly transform every experience we have in consumer electronics,” said Eui-Suk Chung, head of Samsung’s software and AI division, at the 2018 Samsung Developer Conference. “At Samsung, Bixby is our singular commitment to AI. We believe Bixby fundamentally changes the way people use technology and what they can do with AI.”

So far, though, Bixby has lagged behind Amazon's Alexa and Google Assistant in both market share and functionality, and some analysts have questioned whether Bixby will ever catch up, even with Samsung's deep pockets and muscle.

Neon could represent Samsung's next step in artificial intelligence, though it's unclear how it will interact with Bixby. The company tweeted on Christmas Day that "contrary to some news, Neon has nothing to do with Bixby or anything you may have seen before."

In an interview with Indian business news publication Mint, Mistry said that artificial intelligence "has many years of development before science fiction becomes reality," hinting that Neon may not create technology that is immediately usable. Whatever Neon announces, it likely won't become reality for some time. Mistry did offer some clues about Neon's ambitions, though.

“While movies may disrupt our sense of reality, ‘virtual humans’ or ‘digital humans’ will become a reality,” he told Mint in late December. “A digital human can expand its role and become part of our daily lives: a virtual news anchor, virtual receptionist or even an AI-generated movie star.”