A venture capital firm in Hong Kong has hired an artificially intelligent algorithm to its board of directors.
Read that again.
Deep Knowledge Ventures said that the AI would help make financial and business decisions, help lead its research into biotechnology and regenerative medicine, and would act as an "equal member of the board".
The AI is officially called Vital, ('Validating Investment Tool for Advancing Life Sciences'), and was developed by Aging Analytics UK.
The machine is apparently able to predict which science companies will be good investments, according to Aging Analytics, which is theoretically good news for Deep Knowledge, which "routinely invest[s] in both private and public companies specializing in biotechnology, regenerative medicine, oncology, drug discovery, bioinformatics and personalised medicine" according to BetaBeat.
Dmitry Kaminskiy, senior partner at the firm, says that the machine could "automate due diligence and use historical data-sets to uncover trends that are not immediately obvious to humans that are surveying top-line data".
He added in an interview that the set up of board meetings won't literally be humans and one laptop sitting around a table, but said its opinions will be given equal weight.
"The intuition of the human investors together with machine’s logic with give a perfect collaborative team," he said.