Demis Hassabis, DeepMind’s CEO and founder, today announced the historic news that its machine, AlphaGo, won its third game in a row versus 18-time Go world champion, Lee Sedol. With the third win under its belt, that’s the five-game match now sealed. A machine has officially beaten the world’s best player at a game which is widely considered to be very difficult to teach a machine.
Speaking in South Korea (where he was also seen using an iPhone), Eric Schmidt addressed the possibility of Google’s driverless cars expanding outside of the United States. In an interview with The Telegraph, Schmidt explained that UK officials have approached the company about bringing its self-driving vehicles to the streets.
As achievements go, learning how to pick up objects doesn’t sound quite as impressive as twice beating the world Go champion – it is, after all, something the average toddler can do. But it’s the fact that the robots themselves figured out the best way to do it using neural networks that makes this notable.
A recent Google report spotted by TNW explains how the company let robot arms pick up a variety of different objects, using neural networks to learn by trial-and-error the best way to handle each. Some 800,000 goes later, the robots seemed to have it figured out pretty well …
Google’s AI system AlphaGo, part of its DeepMind project, has again beaten world champion Lee Sedol – and looks like it may be on track to take the title in the next game. Engadget reports Sedol saying that he was left speechless by his defeat.
“I’m quite speechless,” said Lee in the post-match conference. “It was a clear loss on my part. From the beginning there was no moment I thought I was leading.”
DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis tweeted that AlphaGo “played some beautiful creative moves in this game” …
Google is pushing forward with its Project Loon plans to bring Internet access to remote parts of India as The Economic Times today reported the company is currently in talks with local telecommunications providers.
The publication spoke with Google India chief Rajan Ananda who confirmed the talks with local providers for Loon without naming specific companies, but the report noted telco BSNL among other unnamed companies are actively included in the discussions.
Google is working on something outlandish in the middle of New Mexico, according to recently filed FCC documents. The documents, first discovered by HackADay, show that Google is currently testing a 100KW radio transmitter at Spaceport America in New Mexico.
If you’ve ever been bored and felt like putting together some kind of tech project, Google suggested one back in 2007 – and there’s still time to give it a go. The project? A Moon shot. A literal one.
Google’s Lunar XPRIZE offers $20M to the first team able to land a privately-funded robot on the Moon, with other prizes for hitting milestones along the way, and the company has today announced a series of short films documenting the story behind nine of the teams competing for it.
Academy Award-nominated director Orlando von Einsiedel, Executive Producer J.J. Abrams, Bad Robot and Epic Digital have joined forces with Google and XPRIZE to create a documentary web series about the people competing for the Google Lunar XPRIZE …
Update: Video of the damage has surfaced on YouTube, see below.
In what is likely to become its first accident to be officially documented as at the fault of Google, one of the Mountain View company’s self-driving cars struck a public transit bus earlier this month while trying to get around a sandbag in the road. According to the accident report filed with the California DMV, the car was “traveling at less than 2 mph” and struck the bus as it passed on its left side…
Project Loon is undoubtedly one of Google’s most inventive and ambitious projects to date. Formerly part of the Google X group, now under the ‘X’ Alphabet sub-division, these airborne signal boosters will provide high speed LTE coverage to rural areas in a number of developing markets. Sri Lanka and Indonesia are set to be among the first regions to get these stratospheric floating towers. In a G+ post, the team showed off how they get the balloons off the ground…
After much rumor and speculation floating around over the last couple of days, Sony has now confirmed in a statement that its Z series of flagship smartphones is now dead. The Z line has “reached its culmination,” according to the Japanese company, and it’s now time for a “new chapter and evolution” in its product strategy…
Earlier this year, we told you across several exclusive reports that new Glass hardware was in development, namely a variant of the device reworked with the enterprise in mind. Now, a couple months after getting our first look at the device in the flesh, a newly-granted Google patent provides us yet another look at the elusive remnant of a less than ideal Glass of the past…
Google’s parent company Alphabet told a TED conference in Vancouver that its Project Loon Internet-delivery balloons had successfully delivered speeds of 15Mbps – fast enough for streaming video. It is preparing for carrier tests in Indonesia and elsewhere this year.
Alphabet X head Astro Teller said that the company tried a lot of unsuccessful balloon designs before finally finding one that was up to the job, reports Re/code.
There were shiny balloons and round balloons and balloons that looked like giant pillows. But eventually the company found a design that could be made cheaply and still navigate precisely. That balloon, Teller said, last year travelled around the world 19 times over 187 days last year.
Teller also shared a key part of the company’s approach to Alphabet X projects, along with details of two which the company has abandoned …
According to a report over the weekend from Crain’s Detroit Business, Google/Alphabet is seeking an R&D site for its self-driving cars near Ann Arbor, Michigan. This report comes as FCC documents last month revealed that the Mountain View company was planning to bring the cars to four new cities. Kirkland, Washington officially became one of those locations two weeks ago, and as we noted, a location near Ann Arbor makes perfect sense to be one of the next bunch…
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The Guardian spotted a slew of new job listings for Google’s self-driving car project, ranging from a marketing manager to manufacturing process engineers. In all, the company has advertised 36 jobs in the autonomous car division – though none of them are for (non-) drivers …
Image via Noah Berger for The New York Times
After joining genetics research firm Illumina’s board of directors back in 2014, long-time Google employee and Senior VP Jeff Huber is now leaving Google for a full-time position at the company. Huber noted the change on his LinkedIn profile where he lists his new role as CEO at Illumina’s Grail Inc as of this month, a startup developing cancer detecting technologies, and the company made an official announcement today via Bloomberg:
A new patent that surfaced on Tuesday (via Qz) suggests that Google/Alphabet could have plans to use its self-driving car technologies for a truck-based delivery service. The patent describes an “autonomous delivery platform” for an autonomous truck with lockers (not unlike an Amazon locker), driving to a customer’s location to deliver a package…
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While Google has expanded its US-based autonomous vehicle trials to include both Texas and Kirkland, WA since its launch in Mountain View, it seems the company is being courted by another city across the pond. London transport officials are said to be in “active discussions” with Google to convince the tech giant to test its driverless cars in England’s capital…
According to some FCC documents recently unearthed, Alphabet’s X division (formerly Google[x]) has its sights set on disconnecting the cute fully-electric self-driving car prototypes from their wall chargers. Yes, we’re talking wireless charging, the kind that could beam up energy through the bottom of the car using a technology called resonant magnetic induction…
Last week we told you that four more mysterious cities are set to get Alphabet’s self-driving cars in the relatively near future, and now the California company has said (via Reuters) that the next city on the list—following Mountain View, CA and Austin, TX— is Kirkland, Washington…
Google’s self-driving cars have notched up almost 1.5 million miles in autonomous mode since the project began in 2009 – but they drive twice as many miles every single day in the lab. Google’s latest monthly report reveals that every software change is tested by using it to simulate driving the entire driving history of the fleet, autonomous and manual.
One benefit of teaching a computer to drive is that it has great memory and recall. With our simulator, we’re able to call upon the millions of miles we’ve already driven and drive those miles again with the updated software. For example, to make left turns at an intersection more comfortable for our passengers, we modified our software to adjust the angle at which our cars would travel. To test this change, we then rerun our entire driving history of 2+ million miles with the new turning pattern to ensure that it doesn’t just make our car better at left turns, but that the changes creates a better driving experience overall …
We told you a couple of weeks ago about how Google[x] recently got a new coat of paint (now under the Alphabet umbrella and simply known as “X”), and now that coat of paint has hit the web. The site has a brand new design, a new logo, and within you’ll find a rundown the group’s newly refocused mission. Additionally, the new Graduated Projects page seems to mention some projects we’re familiar with and some that we haven’t heard of previously…
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It seems as if speculation surrounding the Moto X+1 has been floating around the rumor mill for months now. Every week, it’s as if an announcement is imminent, then, more rumors build up and the phone remains a mere myth. This week is no exception, with a mysterious Motorola device appearing in Geekbench’s database.
As Microsoft completed its acquisition of Nokia’s smartphone and handheld business this past week, Stephen Elop — the former Microsoft executive turned Nokia CEO — has made various comments about the future of the Android-based Nokia X line. Many, including ourselves, expected Microsoft to cancel the device the moment the acquisition was officially approved, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Stephen Elop, now the Vice President of Microsoft’s Devices and Services unit, stated the following:
Microsoft acquired the mobile phones business, inclusive of Nokia X, to help connect the next billion people to Microsoft’s services. Nokia X uses the MSFT cloud, not Google’s. This is a great opportunity to connect new customers to Skype, outlook.com and Onedrive for the first time. We’ve already seen tens of thousands of new subscribers on MSFT services.
We are using AOSP to attack a specific market opportunity, but we are being thoughtful to do it in a way that accrues benefit to Microsoft and to Lumia.
The Nokia X is a low-cost device that runs a heavily-modified version of Android. The device is part of Nokia’s strategy to target emerging nations and the low-end device market.
This position makes sense, in light of Microsoft’s most recent strategy of focusing on services but you can’t help but wonder what it says about Windows Phone OS that Microsoft actually needs an Android product.
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We have been hearing a lot about the much rumored Motorola X phone. Motorola’s new advisor Guy Kawasaki has been hinting at some big customization options for upcoming Motorola devices, and previously Google CEO Larry Page said Motorola was working on some advanced new features for future smartphones. Some sketchy reports of specs first leaked earlier this month, but a new report today would seem to make sense given Page’s previous comments.
While they don’t exactly match the rumored specs from earlier this month, PhoneArena is reporting a tipster has provided some information on specs for the Motorola X device. Most notable is the mention of a 4.8-inch made of sapphire glass and a 4,000mAh battery, two things that would seem to line up with Page’s comments related to better batteries and impact-resistant designs.
Other specs in the report include corners “made with rubber bumpers”, a carbon fiber back case, and a quad-core 2Ghz Quallcomm Snapdragon 800. The rubber bumpers could also be related to Page’s comments about devices that are more resistant to impact. PhoneArena is also claiming that the device will be water resistant and launch in November in time for the holiday shopping season.
No word on potential hardware customization options as speculated by many following Kawasaki’s comments.
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