[OPLIN 4cast] OPLIN 4cast #371: Google of the future

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OPLIN 4Cast

OPLIN 4cast #371: Google of the future
February 5th, 2014

DeepMind logoA couple of weeks ago, Google confirmed that it had 
purchased DeepMind, a London artificial intelligence company. This set 
off a flurry of speculation in the technology press: What is Google 
planning now? Nobody but Google knows for sure, but some of the best 
technology journalists think they have it figured out, though they don't 
completely agree. We will probably know soon enough what the Google of 
the future will be, but it seems certain that this latest acquisition 
has /something/ to do with Google's core objective to make all of the 
world's knowledge accessible.

  * Google's game of Moneyball in the age of artificial intelligence
    <http://readwrite.com/2014/01/29/google-artificial-intelligence-robots-cognitive-computing-moneyball>
    (ReadWrite/Dan Rowinski) "This is exactly what Google is doing:
    exploiting market inefficiency to land undervalued talent. Google
    determined that intelligent systems and automation will eventually
    be served by robotics and has gone out of its way to acquire all of
    the pieces that will serve that transformation before any of its
    competitors could even identify it as a trend. By scooping up the
    cream of the crop in the emerging realm of robotics and intelligent
    systems, Google is cornering the market on talented engineers ready
    to create the next generation of human-computer interaction."
  * Google acquires human-like AI company for $500 million, Skynet is
    now a real possibility
    <http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/175424-google-acquires-human-like-ai-company-for-500-million-skynet-is-now-a-real-possibility>
    (ExtremeTech/Sebastian Anthony) "...DeepMind appears to be in the
    business of creating artificial general intelligence (AGI). The
    co-founder and apparent brains of the operation, Demis Hassabis, has
    published some papers on AGI. AGI (sometimes referred to as strong
    AI) is different from conventional AI (weak AI) in the sense that it
    is capable of performing (and learning from) very general tasks.
    Most AI (weak AI) is programmed to perform a very specific task....
    AGI, on the other hand, is programmed so that it solves problems in
    a much more human way. Where weak AI is usually characterized by
    speed and accuracy, strong AI is more closely linked to reasoning,
    planning, self-awareness, consciousness, and communicating in
    natural language. In other words, if you want to build useful,
    human-like robots, you need a really good AGI."
  * Google buys A.I. company for search, not robots
    <http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/28/google-buys-a-i-company-for-search-not-robots/>
    (New York Times/Nick Bilton) "People who work with Google but could
    not be named because they were not allowed to speak publicly for the
    company, said the acquisition of the artificial intelligence
    software had nothing to do with robots, but everything to do with
    semantic technology and the ability to understand what people were
    asking for online and answer in a very human way."
  * More on DeepMind: AI startup to work directly with Google's search
    team
    <http://recode.net/2014/01/27/more-on-deepmind-ai-startup-to-work-directly-with-googles-search-team/>
    (Re/code /Liz Gannes and James Temple) "So what will Google do with
    DeepMind? Artificial intelligence is core to many teams at Google,
    from the self-driving car to the search results page. Jeff Dean (the
    Google executive running the team that DeepMind is joining) was the
    lead author on a paper in 2012 that boasted of training a deep
    network '30 times larger than previously reported in the literature'
    for the purposes of large visual object recognition tasks and speedy
    speech recognition. He also worked on a somewhat famous project
    <http://allthingsd.com/20120625/and-for-google-xs-next-trick-it-will-identify-cat-videos/>
    where a neural network of 16,000 computers presented with stills
    from 10 million YouTube videos taught itself to recognize cats."

*/Purchasing fact:/*

In addition to DeepMind, Google has recently purchased at least six 
robotics companies.
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