I absolutely agree that comparing Google and apple is silly. But calling Google an "artificial intelligence" company is just feeding another buzzword into the fire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect#AI_is_whatever_hasn....
it may be the case that 'intelligent' is just a word used to make humans feel special things about mammalian brains, but it's also consistent that we overestimate the difficulty of the abilities that add up to 'intelligent'. It's the difference between moving the goal posts and having our perspective changed so that we realize that the goal is further away than we thought.
To put it another way, if we define a Scotsman as anyone born in Scotland and/or related to someone born in Scotland, we've essentially just defined a Scotsman as every organism ever to be alive on Earth.
I have to imagine when the term first started to be used people imagined an AI as something more human than neural networks. Imagine HAL or any other hollywood perceived robot.
My personal bet is on people placing that line squarely on the divide between "Stoic Guru" and "Active Academy" UX models[1]. An AI is probably, to most people, an agent that continues to think and learn when it is not being interacted with—by surfing the internet, maybe—such that it can generate novel outputs, and revise its own previous beliefs, with no user-visible step that would be perceived as "re-training." Something that will come to you with thoughts it has had that you'll find relevant, that were inspired by new data the agent has acquired not derived from your input.
A simple example that people would probably think of as "AI" (and which people wouldn't accept as a UX paradigm unless it was presented to them through an agent-based interface) would be a spam filter like GMail's that learns from the classifications of everyone who uses it, that would go back and reclassify messages that it now had a more refined opinion on. Nobody would want a dumb algorithm to take emails that "were" in their inbox and move them over into their spam folder—that's destructive!—but they'd accept a (virtual) secretary using their judgement to do so. Thus, AI.
[1] https://scifiinterfaces.wordpress.com/category/active-academ...
So if you want to describe Google as a (insert thing here) company, really the thing to insert in the parentheses would be something like "massive computing infrastructure".
And for better or worse, "AI" is still associated in many people's minds with things that the Google search box isn't close to resembling. People expect an AI to hold a conversation, or be able to reach (and explain) novel conclusions, rather than heuristically guess the next word you'll type (given the computing power, not terribly hard given the informational entropy of human languages) or scan a large database quickly to return the result you asked for. People mostly don't see fast brute-force searching of a problem space, for example, as "intelligence", but that's most of the secret sauce behind game-playing "AI".
So? The fact that it is worth a damn at playing go was unexpected to most people afaict. What do you mean "fundamentally novel", are you expecting the field to advance from cars that barely avoid accidents, to Ava in one fell swoop?
Frankly I would prefer that advancement in AI not occur in sudden unexpected bursts of progress, thanks.
Back when neural nets were "fundamentally novel" we didn't have the understanding or computing power to tap their potential. So they "weren't really AI" because they couldn't do much that was interesting.
Now, we have a better understanding of how to use them, and we have enough computing grunt to make them do really interesting things. But they're "not really AI" because they're "not fundamentally novel."
I think the concepts behind this were known 10 years ago - they improved and made it scale/we got the hardware and productized it - but would it really "blow your socks off" ? Hell I'm kind of disappointed at the development speed, I was expecting real personal assistants (not something trivial like Siri) by now.
Nowadays you can search for "young einstein" and get 3 pictures of Yahoo Serious and 10 pictures of Albert Einstein as a young man. It still looks like magic to me even though I know a bit about how it works.
What people want to see is artificial general intelligence, currently that is not possible.
Does running human software on biological hardware make it sentient, or would the same be true on other forms of hardware?
That hardware is just doing what it's been told to.
This concept seems to be a direct abstraction of hindsight bias.
In fact, the concept of hindsight bias feels very much like every aspect of life, also. As soon as you build the next great tower, you opt for a new wave of bigger, more powerful enemies (i.e., you level up), and so the solution for the last wave no longer feels that interesting anymore, and thus seems, perhaps, obvious.
Considering that Amazon could have run a simple account search to determine that I am definitely not interested in seeing ads for a product that I already own, I think that the AI-targeting ad revolution is a while off yet.
That is unrelated to Google, but I haven't seen anything there that would suggest they are running anything smarter.
The deal is those ads show up when the ad space is the cheapest. It's known as remant inventory. So the retargeters can pick it up for very cheap.
The deal is the companies KNOW that some people see ads for things they already bought. But some people are seeing ads for things like only considered, and bombarding them with ads does affect behavior. The question is, is the increase in revenue worth the cost of retargeting.
The answer is very much yes. Even as it annoys people who already bought it, which doesn't even factor since they already made the revenue from your purchase.
A lot of assumptions we make don't hold up when you start gathering real data.
It ain't gonna pass the Turing test anytime soon, and it's not more of an "AI" product any other product with basic algorithmic based matching is.
OP has a point.
Sure. And we didn't use to call them "AI companies".
Though I fail to see any application of machine learning to write home about in their core business -- ads.
Search yes, they do a good job on that.
But given the amount the data they have on us (browsing history, profile, mails in Gmail) has anybody been that impressed with any targeted ad? I've seen targeted ads from "dummy" networks like the Deck that are 1000% times better for my interests.
Sure, that's fine, but since ML is generally considered to fall under the AI umbrella your statement is more precise but not more correct.
> Though I fail to see any application of machine learning to write home about in their core business -- ads.
I know basically nothing about our ads (I work for Alphabet), but I believe there is some kind of ML involved.
I can search the internet way better. Email me what you are looking for and 9 times out of 10 I will send you back something better than what Google will spit out. Furthermore you won't even have to sift through 10 links, or change your search, I will do all this and send you the result back.
What are you even proposing, human search agents? That's absurd.
They do. Most companies which build their primary product on some form of heuristics have "domain experts" who help filter the wheat from the chaff.
Ok, so you agree partially.
Can you do it for me in 100ms or better
Not all searches require an immediate reply, so I'll just focus on those. Looking at the list of the most expensive keywords on Google, it is safe to say the vast majority consist of searches that do not necessitate a decision at the moment of the first try. Think Attorney, Insurance, Travel.
and at no cost?
Yes. It is free, and ad supported.
Really goes to show how much the market works on the 2nd derivative, and how that can result in immensely disproportionate market caps relative to a company's profitability.
If I were Apple I would think about seriously ramping up the stock buyback at this point. If they keep it up long enough they could even take themselves private one day.
People use Google for search, email, maps, etc. And that's what the company was built for. If they had a better way to monetize than ads, they would certainly drop ads.
The way a company makes its money is only weakly correlated to the service it offers to users. Think about it: if McDonalds stopped selling food, it would not have any customers. If Google stopped offering search, it would not have any users.
I don't see the McDonald's reference as the same, drinks are part of their food product. Ads are not a integrated part of search (google did not start out having ads).
If someone asks, which of the 2 answers would be more helpful to them?
But yeah, I agree with you. Businesses are more complex than individual touchpoints.
eg: http://www.businessinsider.com/movie-concessions-drive-amc-e...
Yup don't say "Taylor Swift is in the online concert tickets business", she is in the music business.
McDonald's not in the hamburgers-and-cokes business, its in the fast food business.
Just because it's the way they make money it doesn't mean is the most appropriate classification.
Although originally theaters wanted nothing to do with popcorn: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/why-do-we-eat-pop...
I was just referring to the fact that theaters make most of their money from concessions, but you wouldn't then call them a concession company. No one would go to a theater just for the concessions. They would (and do) go just for the movie though.
> "Movie theaters wanted nothing to do with popcorn," Smith says, "because they were trying to duplicate what was done in real theaters. They had beautiful carpets and rugs and didn't want popcorn being ground into it." Movie theaters were trying to appeal to a highbrow clientele, and didn't want to deal with the distracting trash of concessions—or the distracting noise that snacking during a film would create.
> When films added sound in 1927, the movie theater industry opened itself up to a much wider clientele, since literacy was no longer required to attend films (the titles used [in] early silent films restricted their audience). [emphasis added]
Actually, yeah. I worked in cinema (as a projectionist) before getting into tech, and the management definitely saw the food counter as more important than the movies being shown.
The place was run like a fast-food restaurant.
OK, to be fair, search is still very important too (in fact the most important content provider for their ad business). So call them a "search and advertising company".
They use machine learning and are actively researching it, but that's true of a lot of companies. Is IBM an AI company?
That's how they've decided to brand themselves, at least (as of ~four months ago): http://adage.com/article/datadriven-marketing/ibm-replaces-s...
I'm not saying they don't do AI, I'm just saying it's not their unique focus that sets them apart from other companies. Search-and-ads sets them apart.
You could certainly identify very large datacenters, Big Data and now machine learning as tools that Google have pioneered. But they don't have an exclusive lock on those.
(Said the guy whose work is related to Android...)
“Oh, we’re really making an AI.” -Larry Page [0]
[0] http://www.wired.com/2014/10/future-of-artificial-intelligen...
A much more cynical way to look at it is, judging a company based on its aspirations means judging them based on their marketing rather than their products, services, or actions.
Think of how differently Comcast would be perceived if everyone wanted to talk about the company Comcast wishes it was, rather than company that it is. Or any company you don't like for whatever reason.
Sure, but even so (except for the way some people treat Google), we typically call companies that make their money by placing ads in a service or media offering an "X company" where X describes the service or media offering, not "advertising".
From that perspective, Google is an online services company, with AI playing an important role in some of its services.
Calling Google an "AI company" seems like calling Ford in 1962 "a streamlining company" - which is does violence to the concept even if Ford in 1962 maybe some money with streamlined cars.
I've had to un-learn my search query habits from the past. I used to attempt to express queries in ways that I thought would help the search engine (limit it to keywords, suppress keywords that are likely to produce false positives, etc.). Now, it seems better to put in sentence fragments, and the old way of a few specific thought out keywords is actually worse at producing the result I want.
The difference is small to the average HN user (most of us are just as capable of expressing queries both ways, and we'll find what we're looking for) but the latter kind of query is far more accessible to the average person.
eh, either way Google is described it's just trying to be a cute soundbite with next to no information.
You can call them an advertising company, but they create the products that most of their ads are seen in, so really they're an advertising company and a software company. They build the data centers all that software runs on or comes from, so they're also a data center company. And if they're using AI in most of their products these days (no idea), you could fairly add AI company on there too.
So what is the X in "they're an X company"? A better question is why does it matter what the X is? You don't gain any insight by filling it in.
Instead we could go crazy and use like two, even three sentences to describe what a company does, what its incentives are and where its constrained.
What would be your "crazy" characterization of Google?
The business focus matters because the ad market is in trouble, and unless Alphabet has something in the pipeline to replace ads, five to ten years from now the company is going to be where Yahoo is today.
This seems hard to imagine now, but no one expected DEC to fail, or HP to turn into that thing it turned into, or Microsoft to sit on a grenade labelled "Windows", or IBM to drift off to the margins of the web - and so on.
What evidence shows the ad business in trouble? Alphabet recorded revenue and profit in the quarter.
Sure, but for every unexpected floundering there are many more predictions of failure that never occurred. I'm not sure how unexpected failures in general give any insight beyond that they exist.
It doesn't necessarily mean that.
It's more common to associate "X" with their business competency.
If we always insist on X to be only defined by revenue, we then get the following type of soundbites that we pat ourselves on the back for:
- McDonalds is actually a real estate company and not a hamburger company because they make more money from rent than from food
- General Electric is really a bank because GE Capital has higher revenue than GE Aviation or GE Energy
- Harvard University is really a hedge fund and not a school because the endowment income is greater than the tuition paid by students
- Lebron James is actually an advertising spokesperson instead of a basketball player because he gets most of his money from corporate endorsements instead of the NBA player contract. Same thing can be said for NASCAR drivers and Olympic athletes.
Are the twisted examples above really how we categorize companies/celebrities? We don't label NY Times, National Geographic, and NBC/CBS/ABC/Fox as "ad companies". Instead we respectively call them "newspaper", "magazine", and "tv networks". Being a conduit for ads does not define each of them as an ad company.
It's much more reasonable to think of Google Inc as a AI/search/maps/cloud company that happens to get most of their revenue from ads. They are not an "ad company".
We don't compare McDonalds with Donald Trump development properties. We compare McDonalds with Burger King. We also don't compare Google Inc with Omnicom Group; instead we compare Google Search with MS Bing, and Android vs iPhone, and other technologies.
- McDonalds is a real estate company
- General Electric is really a bank
- Harvard University is really a hedge fund
- Lebron James is actually an advertising spokesperson
Are the twisted examples above really how we categorize companies/celebrities?
It makes no sense to categorize McDonalds as a real estate company because its cost structure, hiring policies, marketing efforts, and everything else about the company in no way reflect the components of a traditional marketing company.
If "LeBron James" was a publicly traded company and you categorized him as an advertising spokesperson, would you then take him out of the gym and have him spend 4 years pursing an MBA?
No. Neither would the shareholders. Also, he's a lot more successful than a lot of MBAs. The whole point is that maybe the preconceived notions and categorizations aren't all there is to it.
I find this interesting. Are McDonalds making most of their revenue from real estate rents from their franchisees and/or those involved in their supply chain, or is the bulk of this land outside their hamburger business?
Dollars wise McDonalds does make more in rent than in selling food (by about 2x).
Search, Gmail, Android, Chromebooks, Nexus, Pixel, Youtube, Maps etc. everything is about selling advertisements after scanning user provided data.
The rest are either loss leaders or moats, or ones with unclear monetization scenarios like Fiber. One exception is GCE and GAE, but I don't know how much profit/revenue they're making. I would count Google Apps, but until recently they were scanning even paid Google Apps for Business accounts for ad tracking purposes.
The reason why it's not incorrect to call Google an AI company is that Wall Street thinks they'll be able to shake out ever more cash from their machines in the future because of their position in ML and AI. It's their competitive edge and one that becomes more and more valuable as software continues to eat the world.
AROUND 2002 I attended a small party for Google—before its IPO, when it only focused on search. I struck up a conversation with Larry Page, Google’s brilliant cofounder, who became the company’s CEO in 2011. “Larry, I still don’t get it. There are so many search companies. Web search, for free? Where does that get you?”… But Page’s reply has always stuck with me: “Oh, we’re really making an AI.”
http://www.wired.com/2014/10/future-of-artificial-intelligen...