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Inside Google Brain

wired.com

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Re: Inside Google Brain

#61

Post by api »

cpeterso wrote: post #56
api wrote: post #37

"Google isn't really a search company-- it's a machine learning company." No, it's an advertising company. That's who pays the bills. At the end of the day all this cool tech is to better understand and model human beings in order to better push ads. Sometimes it depresses me that so many of the world's most brilliant minds are working on that, but a generation or two ago they'd all be building doomsday bombs. I gues…

Google is DoubleClick, literally. I don't think people would be so quick to use a web browser or mobile phone built by DoubleClick instead of Google.

I do think people understand that, and I think it's one of the reasons Glass seems like it's a failing product. People are drawing the line at wearing a heads-up mobile camera controlled by an advertising company.

Re: Inside Google Brain

#62

Post by sgnelson »

cpeterso wrote: post #56
api wrote: post #37

"Google isn't really a search company-- it's a machine learning company." No, it's an advertising company. That's who pays the bills. At the end of the day all this cool tech is to better understand and model human beings in order to better push ads. Sometimes it depresses me that so many of the world's most brilliant minds are working on that, but a generation or two ago they'd all be building doomsday bombs. I gues…

Google is DoubleClick, literally. I don't think people would be so quick to use a web browser or mobile phone built by DoubleClick instead of Google.

Well, Google now owns DoubleClick, so yes we are all using search and web browsers and phones made by a bigger, better, DoubleClick.

Re: Inside Google Brain

#63

Post by qnaal »

mseebach wrote: post #60
ttctciyf wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The section title: “Google is not really a search company. It’s a machine-learning company.” might be better, but ... meh, title fussiness. Anyway, it's an ad company!

> Anyway, it's an ad company! Can this meme die soon? Google is an ad company in the same way the New York Times is an ad company. Sure, that's ultimately where the money comes from, but there'd be no ad revenue if search, maps, mail etc weren't all among the very best available and that's a very real and very big engineering problem. Just like if the NYT stopped during journalism, their ads would stop generating rev…

adsense is pretty big

Re: Inside Google Brain

#64

Post by magicalist »

cpeterso wrote: post #56
api wrote: post #37

"Google isn't really a search company-- it's a machine learning company." No, it's an advertising company. That's who pays the bills. At the end of the day all this cool tech is to better understand and model human beings in order to better push ads. Sometimes it depresses me that so many of the world's most brilliant minds are working on that, but a generation or two ago they'd all be building doomsday bombs. I gues…

Google is DoubleClick, literally. I don't think people would be so quick to use a web browser or mobile phone built by DoubleClick instead of Google.

Only 22% of revenue was from ads on other sites in the last quarter, so, no, Google is not DoubleClick, literally or no.

They do own what was DoubleClick, but it's quite different from the DoubleClick of yore (malware distributed over their network seemingly every other day, for instance).

Re: Inside Google Brain

#65

Post by magicalist »

api wrote: post #61
cpeterso wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is DoubleClick, literally. I don't think people would be so quick to use a web browser or mobile phone built by DoubleClick instead of Google.

I do think people understand that, and I think it's one of the reasons Glass seems like it's a failing product. People are drawing the line at wearing a heads-up mobile camera controlled by an advertising company.

You could say the opposite thing about Android: people embracing it in spite of the possibility of a screen they take everywhere and look at all the time controlled by an "advertising company".

And in practice, the same thing is true for Android and Glass: there aren't ads popping up in your face all the time, because that would be a sure way to alienate all your users (which is one of the reasons why the "they're just an advertising company" phrase doesn't give any real insight).

I think it's more likely that having a giant thing on your face that doesn't actually do all that much is more the reason for people seeming to start drawing the line with Glass. That and meme status ("glasshole") and echo chamber effects (most people outside of tech circles don't care either way).

Re: Inside Google Brain

#66

Post by Houshalter »

jfields513 wrote: post #29
ckaygusu wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think human brain is so sophisticated that it can perform its cognitive duties with little data, this is simply wrong. While it is definitely not a simple organic construct, it does get stimulated significantly all the time. See [1] what happens when you cut out this factors. Regarding artificial systems, I think more data is the only way to reach super-performing classifiers. The data you supply doesn't have…

Your first statement here is not true. Humans are excellent at learning from very few or even 1 example. Show a toddler a single image of an elephant and the toddler will generalize perfectly on new examples; show a machine a few thousand images of elephants and it might generalize decently if your machine is really clever. There are very few tasks where machine systems achieve anything resembling human level perform…

Using unsupervised learning (the same as humans) there are machines that can learn from a picture of a single elephant. You first learn a compressed "representation" of images with fewer dimensions than an entire bitmap. Then you can compare that small vector to others.

Re: Inside Google Brain

#67

Post by fzltrp »

valarauca1 wrote: post #51
trevorstrohman wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're describing unsupervised training. It works with computers too, as in this article on using Google Brain to build an unsupervised image classifier. http://www.wired.com/2012/06/google-x-neural-network

Unsupervised training is the deep learning equal of context clues. It sees people talking about cats, sees an image guesses cat. Sees similar images + similar words, eventually builds a cat type prototype. What I'm talking about is a child can see a photo of an unknown animal, I can show that child a cartoon elephant (which is the original animal). I then ask what the original animal is, the child likely responds cor…

This is the ability to abstract concepts and then recognize them in different settings (for instance, the idea of a child being a miniature version of a given animal, with less pronounced traits). In order to understand the clues you are talking about, an AI has first to be familiar with the terms used in the discussed topic, so as to be able to construct a definition by itself (what is "miniature", "traits", "pronounced"). These terms' definition must be synthetized somehow before hand, or perhaps as the discussion goes, but then the amount of necessary information in that discussion must be much larger, for the AI to untangle them properly.

Re: Inside Google Brain

#68

Post by MaysonL »

niangb wrote: post #16
rwissmann wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until you have reached a very large subset of all available information, more data allows you to make better predictions. Period. That is as true for machine learning as it is of the human brain. You often want your models to also perform well when you have fewer data points. Those are two separate - if in effect related - design goals.

This is true to the extent that you are not overfitting your dataset. Neural networks and random trees are quite good at fitting anything! And still they can perform poorly on your validation set.

Overfitting will only occur when the dataset is too small for the model.

Re: Inside Google Brain

#69

Post by dang »

michael_nielsen wrote: post #55
dang wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They certainly are. Can anyone suggest a better one here? We want accurate and neutral.

Could submissions from Wired (& other sites which practice link-baity titles) be automatically put in a moderation queue? They wouldn't appear in the "New" queue until the title had been reviewed by a moderator, and fixed if appropriate. That sort of fix seems to be necessary a large fraction of the time. Regularly having such titles on the front page is a small but real hit to HN's quality.

There actually is a status like that, sort of. But Wired isn't currently in that bucket. We may have to put it in there; their titles have gotten noticeably (to me) more sensational lately.
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