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Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World

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Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World

#371

Post by moonchrome »

taneq wrote: post #249
drewrv wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is whatever hasn't been done yet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect#AI_is_whatever_hasn....

Precisely. The image recognition and natural language processing that's "just a deep learning algorithm" today would have blown the socks off anyone ten years ago. Chess playing programs were AI until they could decisively beat all humans, and then we decided that chess doesn't require intelligence. Self-driving cars were AI until they got close to market and now apparently driving a car doesn't require intelligence.…

>The image recognition and natural language processing that's "just a deep learning algorithm" today would have blown the socks off anyone ten years ago

I think the concepts behind this were known 10 years ago - they improved and made it scale/we got the hardware and productized it - but would it really "blow your socks off" ? Hell I'm kind of disappointed at the development speed, I was expecting real personal assistants (not something trivial like Siri) by now.

Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World

#372

Post by kgwgk »

jedberg wrote: post #81
whack wrote: post #76

Kudos to Google. I'm happy for them. But it's also worth pointing out that Market Cap is a horrendous way to measure how "valuable" or "powerful" a company is. Companies A and B both want to raise $10B to fund a new investment opportunity. A decides to issue corporate bonds, because it doesn't want to dilute its shareholders. B decides to issue new equity instead, because they feel that their company stock is actuall…

In both cases you describe, the company with the higher cap is the more "powerful" company though. In example one, they have a lot more control of their destiny since they have debt and not more shareholders. In number two they have more control because if an opportunity comes up that costs say 10 billion, Company B can act on that and Company A cannot.

> In both cases you describe, the company with the higher cap is the more "powerful" company though. In example one, they have a lot more control of their destiny since they have debt and not more shareholders.

The company with the higher market cap is the one that raised $10bn using equity and not debt. You could say that the company with more equity has more control of their destiny as it has less debt (equity is owned by the company shareholders, debt is owned by third parties), but this is not what you wrote.

Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World

#373

Post by derefr »

iainmerrick wrote: post #350
shimon wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's flagship product is a box that you can type words into, and get relevant texts/references/facts in response. It seems like a textbook example of AI.

Even if you forget the whole "where does the money come from?" angle, they're still an ad company: their flagship products are AdWords and AdSense. OK, to be fair, search is still very important too (in fact the most important content provider for their ad business). So call them a "search and advertising company". They use machine learning and are actively researching it, but that's true of a lot of companies. Is IB…

> Is IBM an AI company?

That's how they've decided to brand themselves, at least (as of ~four months ago): http://adage.com/article/datadriven-marketing/ibm-replaces-s...

Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World

#374

Post by kgwgk »

whack wrote: post #76

Kudos to Google. I'm happy for them. But it's also worth pointing out that Market Cap is a horrendous way to measure how "valuable" or "powerful" a company is. Companies A and B both want to raise $10B to fund a new investment opportunity. A decides to issue corporate bonds, because it doesn't want to dilute its shareholders. B decides to issue new equity instead, because they feel that their company stock is actuall…

You can also use enterprise value (equity+debt-cash) to solve the two issues you mention. By the way, using that metric Google has been already ahead of Apple in the past.

Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World

#375

Post by derefr »

tinalumfoil wrote: post #305
taneq wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Precisely. The image recognition and natural language processing that's "just a deep learning algorithm" today would have blown the socks off anyone ten years ago. Chess playing programs were AI until they could decisively beat all humans, and then we decided that chess doesn't require intelligence. Self-driving cars were AI until they got close to market and now apparently driving a car doesn't require intelligence.…

The problem with calling anything AI is that it's such a meaningless word in the context of computers. According to Wikipedia AI is "intelligence exhibited by machines or software" and Merriam Webster define intelligence as "the ability to learn" so I'd say we hit AI long ago. I'd follow the meaning further but I hate arguing definitions. To put it another way, if we define a Scotsman as anyone born in Scotland and/o…

I take the term AI to mean "a thing that people will actually acknowledge as being AI when it exists"—something that can only be defined retrospectively, but which still is a workable definition in that you can sort of predict what people will or won't want to have "wasted" the eventual definition of the term on.

My personal bet is on people placing that line squarely on the divide between "Stoic Guru" and "Active Academy" UX models[1]. An AI is probably, to most people, an agent that continues to think and learn when it is not being interacted with—by surfing the internet, maybe—such that it can generate novel outputs, and revise its own previous beliefs, with no user-visible step that would be perceived as "re-training." Something that will come to you with thoughts it has had that you'll find relevant, that were inspired by new data the agent has acquired not derived from your input.

A simple example that people would probably think of as "AI" (and which people wouldn't accept as a UX paradigm unless it was presented to them through an agent-based interface) would be a spam filter like GMail's that learns from the classifications of everyone who uses it, that would go back and reclassify messages that it now had a more refined opinion on. Nobody would want a dumb algorithm to take emails that "were" in their inbox and move them over into their spam folder—that's destructive!—but they'd accept a (virtual) secretary using their judgement to do so. Thus, AI.

[1] https://scifiinterfaces.wordpress.com/category/active-academ...

Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World

#376

Post by Stratoscope »

Reedx wrote: post #364
visakanv wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically, movie theaters are in the business of selling "movie experiences", which include the movie, the dark room, the chairs, and yes, the concession stands.

True, it's not a perfect analogy. Popcorn is additive to the experience. Even if theaters could survive sans popcorn sales, they'd still keep it because it's part of the experience. Although originally theaters wanted nothing to do with popcorn: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/why-do-we-eat-pop... I was just referring to the fact that theaters make most of their money from concessions, but you wouldn't the…

That's a really interesting article!

> "Movie theaters wanted nothing to do with popcorn," Smith says, "because they were trying to duplicate what was done in real theaters. They had beautiful carpets and rugs and didn't want popcorn being ground into it." Movie theaters were trying to appeal to a highbrow clientele, and didn't want to deal with the distracting trash of concessions—or the distracting noise that snacking during a film would create.

> When films added sound in 1927, the movie theater industry opened itself up to a much wider clientele, since literacy was no longer required to attend films (the titles used [in] early silent films restricted their audience). [emphasis added]

Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World

#377

Post by tajen »

dhimes wrote: post #291
taneq wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Precisely. The image recognition and natural language processing that's "just a deep learning algorithm" today would have blown the socks off anyone ten years ago. Chess playing programs were AI until they could decisively beat all humans, and then we decided that chess doesn't require intelligence. Self-driving cars were AI until they got close to market and now apparently driving a car doesn't require intelligence.…

Don't forget that Facebook is going to be a big player in this game as well- especially facial recognition, where everybody is helping them by tagging people in their photos.

If we characterize companies as strongly as "Apple, a consumer product company" and "Google an AI company", then Facebook is a worldwide identity tracking agency. They could pivot and be in charge of delivering birth certificates, DNA groups, ethnicity mapping, insurance-bank-police profiling... In fact I expect it to play a very major role in wars to determine targets.

Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World

#378

Post by jankey »

sdenton4 wrote: post #339
toomanybeersies wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google's flagship product is an advertising platform, not a search box.

Nah, Google is a company that turns protobuffers into more differenter protobuffers.

And this is how you recognize a Googler amongst a crowd.

Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World

#379

Post by adrianN »

ubernostrum wrote: post #368
deciplex wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even within the last six months I've seen very confident posts here to the effect of "an AI that is worth a damn at go is still at least 10 years off".

And yet Google's Go-playing approach still doesn't seem to involve fundamentally novel techniques. Most of the advance seems to come in refinements to existing techniques, and being able to throw resources at the problem on a scale nobody had managed before.

Just like James Watt's steam engine was just a refinement of Thomas Newcomen's model and yet fundamentally changed the industrial landscape in Europe.

Re: Alphabet Becomes the Most Valuable Public Company in the World

#380

Post by animal531 »

tinalumfoil wrote: post #305
taneq wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Precisely. The image recognition and natural language processing that's "just a deep learning algorithm" today would have blown the socks off anyone ten years ago. Chess playing programs were AI until they could decisively beat all humans, and then we decided that chess doesn't require intelligence. Self-driving cars were AI until they got close to market and now apparently driving a car doesn't require intelligence.…

The problem with calling anything AI is that it's such a meaningless word in the context of computers. According to Wikipedia AI is "intelligence exhibited by machines or software" and Merriam Webster define intelligence as "the ability to learn" so I'd say we hit AI long ago. I'd follow the meaning further but I hate arguing definitions. To put it another way, if we define a Scotsman as anyone born in Scotland and/o…

A while ago AI hadn't been complex and deep enough to warrant categories (especially to the layman), so it was just a general moniker put on everything from a smart piece of code with some adaptability all the way through to singularity level computer intelligence (as we'd imagine it). Now we're beginning to realise that there are vast ranges of categories out there, but it will take some time for consensus use to form (especially since a lot of them overlap into what we perceive as general intelligence, which we so far have had difficulty in defining and pinning down)
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