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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

#401

Post by taneq »

moonchrome wrote: post #371
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 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 assis…

10 years ago general purpose image comprehension by computers was nonexistent and Google image search for $word basically just returned images with $word in or mentioned near the URL.

Nowadays you can search for "young einstein" and get 3 pictures of Yahoo Serious and 10 pictures of Albert Einstein as a young man. It still looks like magic to me even though I know a bit about how it works.

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

#402

Post by taneq »

oilywater wrote: post #397
dilemma wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A computer running a chess program isn't intelligent because it isn't sentient. It is just doing what it's been told to.

Yeah, and sentience is a completely made up human thing by which we differentiate betweem ourselves and other non-human animals. What people want to see is artificial general intelligence, currently that is not possible. Does running human software on biological hardware make it sentient, or would the same be true on other forms of hardware? That hardware is just doing what it's been told to.

Just wait, after machines become unarguably sentient, the only thing for them to fall back on will be "yeah but it doesn't have a soul". :P

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

#403

Post by coldtea »

genericpseudo wrote: post #254
coldtea wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the text ad which is targeted (crudely) using tons of data and some statistical methods. It ain't gonna pass the Turing test anytime soon, and it's not more of an "AI" product any other product with basic algorithmic based matching is.

Google are a company whose core organizing principle is using statistical methods over obscene amounts of data. Apple is a company whose core organizing principle is selling desirable consumer products with class-leading design through the single most impressive physical supply chain in the world. OP has a point.

>whose core organizing principle is using statistical methods over obscene amounts of data.

Sure. And we didn't use to call them "AI companies".

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

#404

Post by coldtea »

endtime wrote: post #306
coldtea wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the text ad which is targeted (crudely) using tons of data and some statistical methods. It ain't gonna pass the Turing test anytime soon, and it's not more of an "AI" product any other product with basic algorithmic based matching is.

When someone says "Google is an AI company" they're obviously not talking about AGI but about applied stuff like ML and IR.

Well, then how about "Google is an ML company"?

Though I fail to see any application of machine learning to write home about in their core business -- ads.

Search yes, they do a good job on that.

But given the amount the data they have on us (browsing history, profile, mails in Gmail) has anybody been that impressed with any targeted ad? I've seen targeted ads from "dummy" networks like the Deck that are 1000% times better for my interests.

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

#405

Post by unprepare »

tajen wrote: post #377
dhimes wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

you may want to read the book "The Circle" by Dave Eggers. It is about this exact concept, and is quite good (I'm actually only nearly finished with the book, so maybe the ending will suck and i won't recommend it anymore, great so far though!)

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

#406

Post by simonh »

CydeWeys wrote: post #288
bradshaw1965 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... Google is valued highly today because they print money today. They print money because of search and advertising. They are really good at this and that's why their market cap exceed's Apple's today. ... That would be correct if they were value companies throwing off discounted cash flow but both Google and Apple are priced as growth companies. The market believes Apple has peaked in growth and that Google has a b…

> That would be correct if they were value companies throwing off discounted cash flow but both Google and Apple are priced as growth companies. AAPL's P/E ratio as I write this is 10.26. I would strongly make the argument that Apple is thus NOT priced as a growth company.

Which shows you how much the market knows. Apple's PE ratio was 11 back in 2009.

In fact the first years of the iPhone corresponded with a precipitous plunge in their PE ratio as their revenues rose rapidly, but their share price was dragged kicking and screaming along behind them.

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

#407

Post by simonh »

aroman wrote: post #258
petke wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also apple only spends about 3% of revenue on R&D. Google spends about 15% (and so does ms) if i remember correctly. I think at some point this is going to show. If apple isn't careful they might end up making the pretty but dumb phones of tomorrow.

If you consider the fact that Apple's revenue is almost four times that of Google's, the actual difference in spending is not very substantial. Presumably there's some point of diminishing returns on R&D for one company in the billions of dollars range...

Indeed. Apple has been ramping up R&D spending by about 40% per year for many years, which is a phenomenal ramp up, it's just that its revenues have grown even more dramatically.

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

#408

Post by simonh »

percentcer wrote: post #145

It's interesting to that it took this long, just considering the utility of each company. If Apple disappeared tomorrow I'd be moderately inconvenienced, I'd have to pick up an Android handset instead of my iPhone and maybe set up some new podcast feeds. If Google disappeared the world would screech to a halt.

I think we don't know what we would miss out on. Suppose Apple had disappeared before releasing the iPhone or iPad? Suppose Google had disappeared before it launched Wave or Glass?.....er...

Ok, cheap shot, but seriously though, without these companies flagship products the world would be a poorer place. Even their competitors products would be significantly poorer. But it's not so much the present that would suffer from the loss of these companies as it is the future.

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

#409

Post by cowsandmilk »

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…

but serving appropriate ads can be well served by AI. There may be a question of the increased margin that can come from keyword-based to AI-based ads, but it is there.

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

#410

Post by toxican »

cowsandmilk wrote: post #409
iainmerrick wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

but serving appropriate ads can be well served by AI. There may be a question of the increased margin that can come from keyword-based to AI-based ads, but it is there.

Utilizing/developing AI doesn't define your company as an AI company though. All of that has consistently been second to the advertising. Almost everything they do ties back into their advertising business in someway. They're an advertising company with a lot of (awesome) side projects.
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