What's Driving Google's Obsession With Artificial Intelligence And Robots?
Attempting to predict the future?
Why is a company built on finding information and serving up ads, spending vast amounts on a variety of outlandish projects?
Forbes contributor Reuvin Cohen reports that Google is addidig to its mixture of eccentric acquisitions by buying artificial intelligence (AI) startup DeepMind, a London-based company the tech giant bought up for an estimated minimum of $400 million. According to Re/code, which broke the story, the purchase “is in large part an artificial intelligence talent acquisition.”
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DeepMind joins a growing list of robotics and AI companies recently purchased by Google, including
Boston Dynamics, its eighth acquisition of a Robotics Company in the past few months. The robots manufactured by Boston Dynamics possess locomotive abilities replacing the conventional wheel-based robots with ones that look and act more like humans or even certain kinds of animals. Boston Dynamics is also a leading provider of human simulation software. Two of their bipedal robots named Atlas and Petman have a significant degree of freedom, which can only be matched by human beings.
Flutter, which specializes in gesture recognition and, most recently
Nest, which it bought for $3.2 billion and provides smart household items like thermostats and smoke detectors for the Internet of Things.
Reuven Cohen | Forbes
I focus on disruptive trends in technology and cloud computing.
All of the companies it has acquired in the AI and robotics space currently sit within its Google X division, a semi-secret facility dedicated to making major technological advancements.
Work at the lab is overseen by Sergey Brin, one of Google‘s co-founders, and by scientist and entrepreneur Astro Teller. Teller says that they aim to improve technologies by a factor of 10, and to think of “science fiction-sounding solutions.”
Answer: The fundamental infrastructure within Google is based on
language,
speech,
translation
visual processing.
All of this depends upon the use of so called Machine Learning and AI. A common thread among all of these tasks and many others at Google is that it gathers unimaginably large volumes of direct or indirect data.
This data provides what the company calls “evidence of relationships of interest” which they then apply to adaptive learning algorithms.
In turn these smart algorithms create new potential opportunities in areas that the rest of us have yet to grasp.
They might very well be attempting to predict the future based on the search/web surfing habits of the millions who visit the company’s products and services every day.
They know what we want, before we do.
In May of 2013 it launched a Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab to study how quantum computing might advance machine learning and artificial intelligence.
If Google wants to cure diseases, they need better models of how they develop.
If they want cars to drive by themselves, they need better models for how transportation networks operate.
If they want to create effective environmental policies, they need better models of what’s happening to our climate.
And if Google wants to build a more useful search engine; they need to better understand you and how you interact with what’s on the web.
Question: Why would Google spend an estimated half a billion dollars for a “talent acquisition” and what’s with this obsession with Artificial intelligence and robots?
“What drives the Google founders is an acute understanding of the possibilities that long-term developments in information technology have deposited in mankind’s lap. Computing power has been doubling every 18 months since 1956. Bandwidth has been tripling and electronic storage capacity has been quadrupling every year."
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