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AI Businesses Google Technology

Google Search Will Be Your Next Brain 45

New submitter Steven Levy writes with "a deep dive into Google's AI effort," part of a multi-part series at Medium. In 2006, Geoffrey Hinton made a breakthrough in neural nets that launched Deep Learning. Google is all-in, hiring Hinton, having its ace scientist Jeff Dean build the Google Brain, and buying the neuroscience-based general AI company DeepMind for $400 million. Here's how the push for scary-smart search worked, from mouths of the key subjects. The other parts of the series are worth reading, too.
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Google Search Will Be Your Next Brain

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 17, 2015 @08:27AM (#48838281)

    Google search will be my next brain? Who do you think you are talking to, some Yahoo or what?

    • Nice work, but serious hubris and marketing going on here. Google can't seem to find a product these days, and this is just another attempt to get in on the non-robotic servant market. I wish they'd read the scifi books inspiring their products to the freaking end of the book.

      • by ColdWetDog ( 752185 ) on Saturday January 17, 2015 @10:28AM (#48838645) Homepage

        Google doesn't need anymore money, thank you very much. It's fine that they 'waste' it on research. Much like ol Elon.

        Nonetheless, I think they need to think about doing something with less potential for serious problems. I found the phrase

        We never told it during training, ‘This is a cat,’” Dean told the New York Times. “It basically invented the concept of a cat.”

        To be the scariest thing I've read all day. It did that by parsing YouTube. That was the first attempt to parse YouTube with 'Deep Learning".

        I do not want to be around when it finally figures out about 4Chan.

        • Google doesn't need anymore money, thank you very much. It's fine that they 'waste' it on research. Much like ol Elon.

          Nonetheless, I think they need to think about doing something with less potential for serious problems. I found the phrase

          We never told it during training, ‘This is a cat,’” Dean told the New York Times. “It basically invented the concept of a cat.”

          To be the scariest thing I've read all day. It did that by parsing YouTube. That was the first attempt to parse YouTube with 'Deep Learning".

          I do not want to be around when it finally figures out about 4Chan.

          My OMG moment came when I read

          Nobody is saying that this system has exceeded the human ability to classify photos; indeed, if a human hired to write captions performed at the level of this neural net, the newbie wouldn’t last until lunchtime. But it did shockingly, shockingly well for a machine. Some of the dead-on hits included “a group of young people playing a game of frisbee,” “a person riding a motorcycle on a dirt road,” and “a herd of elephants walking across a dry

        • by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

          It invented cats, I think that's cool, who knows what it'll invent next.

    • by Motard ( 1553251 )

      So, deep learning will result in shallow thinking?

      • So, deep learning will result in shallow thinking?

        Sure, same a smartphones make their users more stupid.
        It's Candy Crush all the way down ...

  • Google has always been into complex algorithms, AI, biology research... Neural nets need access to a lot of "knowledge" to learn, and Google has a lot of that. Not only the websites contents, but also how we humans search and browse, mail and answer to a mail, talk etc... - i.e. how we behave using our brain. That gigantic chunk of data would be however useless if it wasn't for Google talents. Google [only] is certainly able to come out with something amazing - fortunately, or unfortunately...
  • by Anonymous Coward

    When I think of International Harvester, or American Tobacco, or Standard Oil, or US Steel, or AT&T, or Microsoft, or Google:

    I met a traveller from an antique land
    Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
    Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
    Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
    And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
    Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
    Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
    The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
    And on the ped

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Another serial medium.com unreadable clickbait spammer.

  • by Paul Fernhout ( 109597 ) on Saturday January 17, 2015 @11:20AM (#48838921) Homepage

    http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d... [ideascale.com]
    "This suggestion is about how civilians could benefit by have access to the sorts of "sensemaking" tools the intelligence community (as well as corporations) aspire to have, in order to design more joyful, secure, and healthy civilian communities (including through creating a more sustainable and resilient open manufacturing infrastructure for such communities)."

    Even just to cope with the implications of what Google is doing in AI... Still working on them, slowly...

    My feeling is that our trajectory coming out of any AI singularity will have a lot to do with out moral and social trajectory going into one. So, we should do all we can now to make the world a better place for everyone, to hopefully improve that outcome.

    I used to do AI in the 1980s, with my undergrad work at Princeton related to the Pointrel system maybe helping a bit to inspire Wordnet (started by my undergrad advisor as I was graduating), and (accidentally) making probably the world's first simulation of self-replicating cannibalistic robots... But in hanging around CMU's Robotics Institute in the mid 1980s, I got the disturbing feeling that it might be too easy to make "Mind Children" good enough to destroy us humans, but not good enough to "replace" us. After all, an aggressive enough self-replicating robotic cockroach could probably do in the human species, and that does not take much intelligence. As I said at a talk I gave at a conference on AI and Simulation, it is very easy to make AI and robots that are destructive (as I learned unexpectedly from my own simulations); it is much harder to make robots that are cooperative (either with each other or humans). Someone from DARPA literally patted me on the back after that talk and said "keep up the good work" -- which gave me a lot of pause, but I'm not sure which aspect he emphasized (the destructive or constructive). But that sort-of cemented my feelings, and I have not worked much on "AI" since (in an independent AI sense; one might argue any knowledge management stuff has a flavor of AI, including my Pointrel system work).

    Still, as with any arms race, and that is what the current push to AI has become, and arms race whether in commercial or military terms, it can be hard to figure out some way out of it before total destruction. So, better sensemaking tools might help with that. There are other problems we wrestle with as well that they could help with, like human health issues. Such tools, as they get smarter, will hopefully be designed as cooperative platforms, for each interaction between the machine and a person, and between people, and between machines.
    http://www.shareintl.org/archi... [shareintl.org]
    "These words written [praising competition] by American college students capture a sentiment that runs through the heart of the USA and appears to be spreading throughout the world. To these students, competition is not simply something one does, it is the very essence of existence. When asked to imagine a world without competition, they can foresee only rising prices, declining productivity and a general collapse of the moral order. Some truly believe we would cease to exist were it not for competition. Alfie Kohn, author of No contest: the case against competition, disagrees completely. He argues that competition is essentially detrimental to every important aspect of human experience; our relationships, self-esteem, enjoyment of leisure, and even productivity would all be improved if we were to break out of the pattern of relentless competition. Far from being idealistic speculation, his position is anchored in hundreds of research studies and careful analysis of the primary domains of competitive interaction. For those who see themselves assisting in a transition to a less competitive world, Kohn's book will be an invaluable resource."

    In gen

  • ... to think for me?
  • any attempt at artificial intelligence from search, so I don't have to keep using quotes and "verbatim" to tell it that yes, I really WAS looking for exactly what I typed, and not all this useless junk. IMO Google's search results have been getting significantly worse over the last couple of years. Sure, all that research is nice, but please give us the option to not use it.
  • Totally Amazed (Score:4, Insightful)

    by tmosley ( 996283 ) on Saturday January 17, 2015 @11:31AM (#48838987)
    I'm totally amazed by the progress these guys are making. Layering two modules together to allow image tagging is a stroke of genius, and seems to me that that lays the foundation for the Singularity RIGHT THERE.

    I kinda wish they would turn some of that computing power toward some blue sky science (imagine deep learning analyzing CERN data, or Hubble imagery, or the human genome, or protein folding, or all of the above). Maybe use some of the resultant knowledge to design and fabricate better components for itself.
    • There are a lot of public databases on those subjects, and more of them popping up all the time. There are also some amazing deep learning tools and resources that are completely open source. Check out Theano, Caffe, or CXXNet. Breaking into the world of deep learning isn't as difficult as most people think. The hardware requirements aren't even that intense anymore as long as you have a CUDA capable GPU (odds are, you do!)

      So lets jump on it. No time like the present.

  • *If you were a pirate, you know what would be the one thing that would really make you mad? Treasure chests with no handles. How the hell are you supposed to carry it?!*

  • I'll wait for Deep Thought.
    ...this might take a while, though.

  • More likely google is struggling hard to justify being duped out of 400 million

"Confound these ancestors.... They've stolen our best ideas!" - Ben Jonson

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