In a recent statement made by Google CEO Sundar Pichai, he said that the company will continue its investment in artificial intelligence and machine learning, making it a constant priority for the company moving forward. This comes as no surprise as Google’s Q3 earnings were looking very favourable thanks to machine learning and artificial intelligence.
With how positive this investment turned out, Pichai added that the company is “re-thinking” of including more machine learning and artificial intelligence into all their products. According to a paper written by Rob Schapire, a professor at Princeton University, machine learning is, “to devise learning algorithms that do the learning automatically without human intervention or assistance“
Most people may not realize it but these learning algorithms are already present in some of Google’s current products such as voice search, translations, maps and more recently, Now On Tap which is able to pull up contextual information from your screen such as restaurants and locations and display them in the same screen which removes the need to do a separate search. Now On Tap, which was presented during this year’s Google I/O and is available on the latest version of Android 6.0 (Marshmallow) is a great representation of machine learning and artificial intelligence at work, even surpassing other competitors such as Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana.
In a response to an analyst’s question about Google’s vision, Pichai said that machine learning and artificial intelligence is a “transformative way of by which we’re re-thinking how we’re doing everything,”, highlighting certain products that could possibly benefit from machine learning integration such as YouTube and Google Play apps. While they are still in its early days, Pichai assured that machine learning will be applied into all of Google’s products in the future.
It looks like Google is taking machine learning and artificial intelligence really seriously as the company’s head of research, Jeff Dean also announced a new Brain Residency Program during the earnings report. The program is a 12-month role, which is similar to a Masters or PhD in deep learning which aims to get machine learning to function like the human brain.