Chatbots were all the craze last decade, and they’re now commonly found when interacting with support lines. Today, conversational agents are a bit limited, and Google is working towards a human-like chatbot “that can chat about anything.”
Machine learning has the potential to fuel major technological developments in countless fields, with Alphabet’s X division already investigating agriculture and food production usage. A team inside Google is now using it for cancer research and detection with a prototype microscope.
Alphabet, through Verily Life Sciences, is invested in applying technology and data science to health care. Google’s in-house Brain team is as well, with the machine learning division running a pilot study that applies existing voice recognition technology to transcribe medical conversations.
After Android but before leaving Google, Andy Rubin led the company’s robotics efforts and acquired several startups, including Boston Dynamics. As part of the Alphabet re-org in late 2015, a majority of the robots division was absorbed into X. That team has remained quiet until today.
Earlier this year, the creator of the Swift language and head of Xcode developer tools left Apple to join Tesla. However, by June, Chris Lattner departed as lead of the car maker’s self-driving Autopilot software. The longtime Apple employee today revealed that he is now joining the Google Brain research division to work on AI.
The shift from “mobile first to AI first” will require a major rethink of how people use and interact with technology. To ensure that this change benefits all, Google is launching a new initiative called PAIR (People + AI Research).
Noting Canada’s artificial intelligence boom, Google announced yesterday that its internal deep learning division is opening another office in the country. The company is also investing $5 million into the new Vector Institute AI research facility.
Google Brain, the search giant’s machine learning arm, is setting up a new group to see if it can teach AI to make its own, original works of art. The company, named Magenta, will be announced more officially at the beginning of June, but was referenced to in a talk given by Douglas Eck, a Google Brain researcher, at Moogfest.
You may remember a little while back it was revealed that Google has been feeding its neural networks steamy romance novels to read. The aim through this exercise was to teach it to produce more human-like responses in order to power its search results and ‘smart reply’ systems.
As well as forcing its neural networks to digest more than 11,000 unpublished books (3,000 of which were romance), Google Brain’s engineers have also been teaching it to relate two unique phrases to each other. As revealed in a Quartz article, the method was fairly straightforward and resulted in some really weird, romantic, dark ‘poetry’.
Google X boss Astro Teller spoke with the New York Times on the topic of the experimental lab and the value it produces for the company, saying that the X lab’s goal is to find new technology markets that the Mountain View company can jump into and problems it can solve.
According to Teller, Google gives X projects a longer period of time in which to prove they can become profitable. He specifically highlights the “Neural Network Project” (previously known as Google Brain) as one project that has turned a serious profit. In fact, Brain is now bringing in enough “value” to offset the costs of running the entire X lab, Teller says:
