J
Jeff Causey
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In a new op-ed piece that came out over the weekend via the BBC, Alphabet’s new chairman Eric Schmidt wrote about artificial intelligence and why he thinks so much progress has been made in recent years. Although the term was coined way back in the 1950’s, progress seemed to languish for quite a while waiting for technology to catch up with researchers.
Schmidt points to the experience of Geoff Hinton as an example of the slow, evolutionary instead of revolutionary progress that has been made. Hinton first developed some of his key pillars regarding artificial neural networks back in the 80’s and then had to wait a couple decades before his team could use the concepts to beat the state of the art in speech recognition in 2009.
Schmidt and Google eventually hired Hinton and his team because they recognized the work had moved from the realm of “could work” to “works better.” That change can be attributed to a couple things, one of which is the phenomenal growth and ability to network computers to increase computing horsepower.
The other big impetus though has been a move to try to solve real-world problems. Google discovered that the same types of questions they were trying to help consumers answer were the same types of problems that artificial intelligence researchers were trying to get computers to learn to answer. This mostly fell into the realm of dealing with lots of unstructured data or a variety of inputs, like languages. Trying to address these challenges forced researchers to raise the bar.
Schmidt points out that consumers are seeing the fruits of these efforts in their products. For instance, Google Photos can recognize the a customer’s first picture of their dog even though it was never labelled as such. Gmail users get a glimpse of this with the filtering that goes on with inbound messages.
Schmidt concludes his piece by urging those involved “to keep thinking first and foremost about people’s real needs and the real world we all inhabit.”
source: BBC
via: The Verge
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