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.