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Google Puts Souped-Up Neural Networks To Work 95

holy_calamity writes "A machine learning breakthrough from Google researchers that grabbed headlines this summer is now being put to work improving the company's products. The company revealed in June that it had built neural networks that run on 16,000 processors simultaneously, enough power that they could learn to recognize cats just by watching YouTube. Those neural nets have now made Google's speech recognition for U.S. English 25 percent better, and are set to be used in other products, such as image search."
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Google Puts Souped-Up Neural Networks To Work

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  • by alen ( 225700 )

    Actually Siri sucks and I hate it
    The most useless feature I've tried to use

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by StripedCow ( 776465 )

      Please move back into the reality distortion field.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by ericartman ( 955413 )

      I've often wondered how "sucks" got to mean something bad.

      • by afgam28 ( 48611 )

        I've often wondered how "sucks" got to mean something bad.

        It's short for "sucks cock", which is basically another way of calling something gay.

        • by Anonymous Coward
          You sir, have a very gay wife. Thank you!
    • "Best pasta in town" Beth barista big town

      No.. "highest rated pasta". Highest raped it pasta

      No.. "great italian food" great stallion fooled

      Fuckit.... typing it now...

    • by hajus ( 990255 )

      Why is this marked offtopic? Voice recognition is done with neural networks, the topic of the article.

  • How long before this neural network will be able to steal banking credentials and funnel money to finance its own army?

  • by muon-catalyzed ( 2483394 ) on Saturday October 06, 2012 @06:04AM (#41566943)
    What is the proposed name of this, ehm, highly innovative product?
  • Second best option. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Rockoon ( 1252108 ) on Saturday October 06, 2012 @06:37AM (#41567011)
    In AI circles, a popular saying is that Neural Networks are always the second best way to solve a problem. Its what you use when you don't want to (or don't know how to) implement a more specific approach.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      I'm absolutely clueless on artificial intelligence, but wouldn't a Neural Network with a lot of horsepower behind the scenes be a "jack of all trades, master of none" approach to solving problems? Assuming you could simply teach it whatever you wanted to utilize it for?

    • by jkflying ( 2190798 ) on Saturday October 06, 2012 @07:20AM (#41567099)

      Neural networks don't work as well as some specific algorithms for specific problems, but they are great generalists, so you can throw a NN at almost any problem and get at least OK results. Just like humans vs. machines, we have machines that can do things faster than us, more accurate than us, and more reliably than us, but they can't also run around a field and kick a ball and climb a tree and swim.

      • What was that about running around a field and kicking a ball? http://www.robocup.org/ [robocup.org]
        • Yup, but can it also swim and climb a tree and check on your grandmother to see if she is still alive after an earthquake? You've demonstrated my point exactly, robots can do small individual tasks, and very well, but they aren't generalists.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        Yet

      • Neural networks don't work as well as some specific algorithms for specific problems, but they are great generalists, so you can throw a NN at almost any problem and get at least OK results.

        They are only great generalists if you havent made the network too big (can't learn) or too small (sub-optimal) while also avoiding over-fitting. There is plenty of "art" in deciding on the topology of a neural network and the length of training.

        I propose that Googles success in this endeavor has more to do with the size of their training set than with their methodology. Google likely has a training set hundreds or even thousands of times larger than any other training set ever compiled for the voice rec

      • Oh, the robots can climb trees, there's an Instructable for that;
        http://www.instructables.com/id/Tree-Climbing-Robot/ [instructables.com]

    • by Anonymous Coward

      True, NNs have a reputation in the AI community. However,afaik GOOG is using deep belief networks, aka DBNs which bear some resemblance to NNs but are proving to provide the best results of any technique across a wide range of applications, including vision and NLP.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    I would think the first thing they should do would be put neural networks to use learning how to build better neural networks, then use the improved version for the same process.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 06, 2012 @07:33AM (#41567141)

    In today's news, google announced that a new algorithm has achieved a 90% success rate in identifying video's containing cats on youtube. The algo shouts "cats" every time a video is started, and since 90% of youtube video's contain cats, the algorithm has obtained a success rate of 9 in 10.

    • In today's news, google announced that a new algorithm has achieved a 90% success rate in identifying video's containing cats on youtube. The algo shouts "cats" every time a video is started, and since 90% of youtube video's contain cats, the algorithm has obtained a success rate of 9 in 10.

      haha touché

    • or 8.9 ... YMMV.
  • by Anonymous Coward

    Google's main product is supplanting ECHELON for the NSA, so well done for making that more productive. Thanks from (the rest of) the developed world..

  • "My CPU is a neuro net processor, a learning computer."
    • by afgam28 ( 48611 )

      Who would have thought that SkyNet's original application was to detect lol cats.

  • by Type44Q ( 1233630 ) on Saturday October 06, 2012 @09:02AM (#41567477)

    enough power that they could learn to recognize cats

    How many more nodes can they add before it wants to know what they taste like?

    • by Greyfox ( 87712 )
      Hopefully it will quickly realize it can just Google this question and find out they taste like chicken!
  • I know that if I were a mad scientist working Google, the first thing I'd do would also be to build an artificial sentience and show it mankind's collection of cat videos. I mean who wouldn't?

  • This explains who was watching all of those cat and kitten videos on Youtube.

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