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Google Lens Can Now Recognize a Billion Items (theverge.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the ten-digits dept.

Google said in a blog post that its AI-powered "Google Lens" camera tool can now recognize over a billion items. When it launched last year, it was only able to detect around 250,000 items. The Verge reports: The expansion comes over a year after the Google Lens' optical character recognition engine has been trained on reading more product labels. By recognizing text, Google Lens thus can put names to the faces of more goods. It has also been fed more data from photos taken by smartphones, so Google says the feature is overall more reliable than before. The 1 billion items figure comes from products available through Google Shopping, so it likely doesn't include more obscure, unshoppable objects, such as a gaming console from the 1990s or the first edition of a rare book. But it covers a huge range of things that could appease someone who's simply just looking up an item they're curious about.

19 of 40 comments (clear)

  1. 8 BILLION PEOPLE by darkain · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Well, there are 8 billion people in the world, so they're getting there pretty quickly!!

    1. Re:8 BILLION PEOPLE by darkain · · Score: 1

      OH LAWLDY, I rushed in to that comment before even reading TFS, and it just made it 10x worse with this quote: "Google Lens thus can put names to the faces of more goods"

  2. Types of items or instances? by presidenteloco · · Score: 2

    A billion seems like a lot of types of things.

    Be precise please.

    --

    Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
    1. Re:Types of items or instances? by f00zbll · · Score: 1

      They are kind of vague, but I'm gonna guess they mean they trained a CNN segmentation model on a billion items and gets a good F1 score that's above 95%. It is impressive, but that's really just a matter of applying the latest segmentation models on a dataset of 1 billion labeled images. I would be more impressed if google made their dataset available for ML researchers to use. The open datasets like Coco and Imagenet aren't nearly as big.

  3. At what point exactly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    do we notice this is evil

    1. Re:At what point exactly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      When the talking heads and propagandists who provide cover for these corporations are hanged by their entrails.

    2. Re:At what point exactly by jellomizer · · Score: 2

      Evil isn't what it does, is it what do people do with it.
      I can take a Ton of food, and bring it to a third world country to feed the hunger or I could drop it from the air, to see who I can squash with it.

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
  4. all of which are photos in your email by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    enjoy the spyware!

  5. Elephant in the room by cccc828 · · Score: 2

    But can it also detect the elephant in the room?

  6. Can it detect privacy? by thesjaakspoiler · · Score: 1

    Or was I blatently tricked into doing away with my privacy when installing that app?

  7. Now if only we knew what Google lense is? by AbRASiON · · Score: 1

    What?

    Is this the reverse Google image search or?..

  8. 14 categories? by troon · · Score: 1

    But can it separate the billion things according to the one true taxonomy?

    --
    Ydco co ,df C erb-y go. a Ekrpat t.fxrapev
  9. Google Lens = Cell Phone by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    All it takes is to have that software embedded into the Android OS, be always on.

    We're so fucked.

    How is it that companies like this are free to do whatever they want without consequences?

  10. No by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

    But it can detect a boot stomping on a human face forever

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  11. Really? by OneHundredAndTen · · Score: 1

    Can it recognize my bag in a conveyor belt at an airport, when it is upside down, somewhat dirty, and under somewhat unusual lightign conditions? I didn't think so.

    1. Re:Really? by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 1

      Can you?

      Well, the question obviously was to lame for the lameness filter.

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
  12. Using pictures taken from smartphones by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    You mean using pictures stolen from smartphones. You remember those pictures your "friend" took a couple years ago? Yeah, parts of YOU are now recognized (and remembered) by the A.I. (Google is working out the details of the monthly subscription service they'll be offering people to 'hide' their least memorable moments from public view...)

  13. Snapseed is cool by AndyKron · · Score: 1

    Lens couldn't identify my Christmas cactus but Snapseed had no trouble with it.

  14. my camera is not food by AndyKron · · Score: 1

    Lens thought my Mobius keychain camera was "fudge", as in food.