artificial intelligence

Building the greatest artificial intelligence lab on Earth by vaughanbell The Guardian has an article on technologist Ray Kurzeil's move to Google that also serves to review how the search company are building an artificial intelligence super lab. Google has gone on an unprecedented shopping spree and is in the throes of assembling what looks like the greatest artificial intelligence laboratory on Earth; a laboratory designed to feast upon a resource of a kind that the world has never seen before: truly massive data. Our data. From the minutiae of our lives. Google has bought almost every machine-learning and robotics company it can find, or at least, rates. It made headlines two months ago, when it bought Boston Dynamics, the firm that produces spectacular, terrifyingly life-like military robots, for an "undisclosed" but undoubtedly massive sum. It spent $3.2bn (£1.9bn) on smart thermostat maker Nest Labs. And this month, it bought the secretive and cutting-edge British artificial intelligence startup DeepMind for £242m. And those are just the big deals... Google has also hired some of the world's leading artificial intelligence researchers:Geoff Hinton, Demis Hassabis, Andrew Ng and Ray Kurzweil just for starters. They are all experts in machine learning - which some would say is quite a limited form of AI that doesn't specifically aim to model itself on human thinking. But it is clearly the most useful in allowing machines to make conceptual connections from fuzzy data. In particular, a technique called deep learning has proved to be a huge leap forward. It works best when it has large data sets to work on. Essentially, large data sets make deep learning useful and this is why Google sees its future in AI.   Link to Guardian article on Kurzweil and Google engineering. vaughanbell | February 23, 2014 at 7:06 pm |