Wonder what the real world impact of this will be. Not much, I expect.
Here's a thought experiment I use to imagine the impact of AI:
Imagine you've got a million people at your disposal. At zero cost and with no downtime, these people can remotely operate robots, understand text, interact using natural language, or classify objects in images, all with human-level intelligence and accuracy. Now what?
Obviously there are areas where AI can outperform humans, like mechanical accuracy and mathematical computation. But in general, I find this experiment works pretty well.
Perhaps a post-Singularity AI will have wild capabilities beyond our comprehension, but that is outside the scope of this experiment.
All other countries probably have smart researchers and engineers, but no one has the data machine that Google has...