Google 'Rethinking Everything' Around Machine Learning (itworld.com)

itwbennett writes: Sundar Pichai took part in his first earnings call Thursday when Google's parent company Alphabet reported its quarterly results, and 'in between discussing the numbers he revealed how important Google thinks machine learning is to its future,' writes James Niccolai. 'Machine learning is a core, transformative way by which we're rethinking everything we're doing,' Pichai said. 'We're thoughtfully applying it across all our products, be it search, ads, YouTube, or Play. We're in the early days, but you'll see us in a systematic way think about how we can apply machine learning to all these areas.'

Comments

Uhhhh

[Aighearach]

Yeah, but there is nothing there to tell us wtf he's actually talking about.

Re:Uhhhh

[phantomfive]

Eh, he started his career as a product manager, and moved up the corporate ladder on the management side.

Let's be honest: he has no clue what he's talking about either. :)

Re:Uhhhh

[martas]

Not sure where you're getting your information, but there is absolutely consensus on what machine learning is. Machine learning is statistics, except with less emphasis on theoretical justification and more emphasis on computational problems. That's it. The philosophical questions you raise seem to be about the general concept of "learning" in the typical human notion of the word, but machine learning is a specific term referring to a specific field of study. It is not the same as "learning as performed by a machine", because very few of the people who actually work in machine learning have any interest in discussing the metaphysical nature of learning except perhaps over a round of drinks. We prefer to spend our time minimizing squared errors, parallelizing descent algorithms, and factoring matrices, not questioning whether a hypothetical book containing translations of all possible sentences can be said to truly know a language or not.

Re:Uhhhh

[slew]

And since Google owns the models, it would be perfectly logical for said model to start making purchasing decisions on the original's behalf, thus massively increasing the value of Google's advertising/data mining services.

I'll bet amazon is working on similar technology given their patent on anticipatory shipping... ;^)

But more seriously, I know people that buy certain items when they get below a certain price (basically, they have their own mental model). If a consumer had such a model of that and shared that with a seller, that's a small step from an automatic bill payment system...

E.g., Buy a ticket to Colorado no more than 3 times a year, during Christmas or winter weekends no less than 1 months in advance if the price is below $230/person round trip. Buy prime NYsteak no more than 4 times a year when it goes below $15/lb.

Of course you can always do this on the consumer side (e.g., automatic shopping tools based on advertised price), but often in price negotiations, the buyers generally get the best price when the seller is confident on closing the deal on the spot before they leave for a competitor.

Re: Too bad they can't do something...

[taustin]

Because conservatives need stuff repeated over and over before they understand?

(The joke works equally well if you reverse the labels.)

So Creepy

[r-diddly]

You think Google knows a lot about you now... just wait until they can make the kind of "educated guesses" deep learning systems are good at.

Re:Machine learning is for cows.

[LifesABeach]

Gary Larson predicted it.

Google Aphapbet: The Letter S

[Required Snark]

S is for Skynet

Re:Go edit Wikipedia, then

[martas]

I agree, "explores the study" could easily be shortened to "studies". But why are we talking about less-than-perfect Wikipedia content? Or are you just grasping at straws to defend your ignorant attack on a highly practical field?