Google's flagship product is a box that you can type words into, and get relevant texts/references/facts in response. It seems like a textbook example of AI.
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.
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...)
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.
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.