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Google Has a New Plan for China (and It's Not About Search) (bloomberg.com)

Posted by msmash on from the new-bet dept.

An anonymous reader shares a report: More than seven years after exiting China, Google is taking the boldest steps yet to come back. And it's not with a search engine. Instead, Google's ingress is centered around artificial intelligence. The internet giant is actively promoting TensorFlow, software that makes it easier to build AI systems, as a way to forge business ties in the world's largest online market, according to people familiar with the company's plans. It's a wide pitch targeting China's academics and tech titans. At the same time, Google parent Alphabet Inc. is adding more personnel to scour Chinese companies for potential AI investments, these people said. "China is a tremendous opportunity for any company because it is by far the single largest homogeneous market," said Kai Fu Lee, who headed Google's China operations before the company left in 2010. The market dwarfs any other, given how many Chinese people are online, and data from that "can be used to advance products, especially those relating to artificial intelligence," he added.

3 of 59 comments (clear)

  1. Re:AlphaGo by 110010001000 · · Score: 1, Insightful

    It isn't that impressive. Go is a game played with strict rules. Computers LOVE rules. They excel at anything that has a strict rule set. That is what they are best at. Why would it be a surprise that a computer can win at ANY game? They can win any game you invent.

  2. Let's see what they've learned by rmdingler · · Score: 4, Insightful
    In its best light, the domestic Chinese market is protectionist and prone to imitation beyond the scope of copyright enforcement.

    Alphabet must now believe they can make inroads to a worthwhile share of the admittedly gigantic market without ultimately losing their technology to domestic companies.

    So the $64,000 Question is, "What sort of arrangement can they (have they) made with Chinese officials that leads them to believe Lucy won't pull the football away at the last second?"

    --
    Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.

    Ernest Hemingway

  3. Re:AlphaGo by AC-x · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Until their processors grow large enough to deal with them. That is just an evolutionary problem

    The search space for Go is estimated at 10^170. If the world's fastest supercomputer could check one move every operation (93 PFLOPS) it would take 3.4*0^145 years to exhaustively solve it (at which point most physical objects will have decayed to subatomic particles).

    The fact that a relatively modest computer has beaten a human at Go today is impressive.