421–430 of 445 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I absolutely agree that comparing Google and apple is silly. But calling Google an "artificial intelligence" company is just feeding another buzzword into the fire.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If Goggle dissapeared, and it might through anti-monopoly laws, I would just move on to another search engine. What am I missing? I don't know all the ins and outs of Google.
Gmail, Google Maps, Google Apps for Business, Android...just to name a few...
I don't use any Google services, personally.
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…
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…
At Google, AI does seem to unite almost everything they do, from search, image recognition, self-driving cars, and ad placement. Of course all their revenue is from ads, so in revenue, they're an advertising company, but in products, they're an AI company.
I'm not saying they don't do AI, I'm just saying it's not their unique focus that sets them apart from other companies. Search-and-ads sets them apart.
You could certainly identify very large datacenters, Big Data and now machine learning as tools that Google have pioneered. But they don't have an exclusive lock on those.
The comparisons between Google and Apple aren't as apples-to-apples as everyone in the media seems to think. If we're talking about the future of these companies, and their earning power, they are situating themselves very differently. Apple is really a consumer electronics company, Google is an artificial intelligence company. And investors think more money will be in the future of AI instead of consumer hardware an…
I absolutely agree that comparing Google and apple is silly. But calling Google an "artificial intelligence" company is just feeding another buzzword into the fire.
AROUND 2002 I attended a small party for Google—before its IPO, when it only focused on search. I struck up a conversation with Larry Page, Google’s brilliant cofounder, who became the company’s CEO in 2011. “Larry, I still don’t get it. There are so many search companies. Web search, for free? Where does that get you?”… But Page’s reply has always stuck with me: “Oh, we’re really making an AI.”
http://www.wired.com/2014/10/future-of-artificial-intelligen...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, the reported market cap on Finance already does that; the after-hours trading explanation seems the better explanation.
"Alphabet shares (GOOGL) jumped 6% after Google's parent reported estimate-topping fourth-quarter results after the bell. Its combined share classes were then worth $554 billion, surpassing Apple (AAPL), which had a value of about $534 billion and whose shares were down slightly after hours." http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2016/02/01/alphabet-... Please note: https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AGOOGL a…
My first reaction was that the problem was one or the other share class being excluded, and then I checked exactly the sources you cite and checked the numbers and realized that couldn't be the problem if.you used Google Finance reported market caps, because they don't report it that way.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
- McDonalds is a real estate company - General Electric is really a bank - Harvard University is really a hedge fund - Lebron James is actually an advertising spokesperson Are the twisted examples above really how we categorize companies/celebrities? Maybe that's not so twisted. Maybe they are how we should really categorize the above, and the common perception is just marketing/how they made their mark initially.
> and the common perception is just marketing/how they made their mark initially. It makes no sense to categorize McDonalds as a real estate company because its cost structure, hiring policies, marketing efforts, and everything else about the company in no way reflect the components of a traditional marketing company. If "LeBron James" was a publicly traded company and you categorized him as an advertising spokespers…
No. Neither would the shareholders. Also, he's a lot more successful than a lot of MBAs. The whole point is that maybe the preconceived notions and categorizations aren't all there is to it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
And here is the exact phenomenon we're talking about, in action! Back when neural nets were "fundamentally novel" we didn't have the understanding or computing power to tap their potential. So they "weren't really AI" because they couldn't do much that was interesting. Now, we have a better understanding of how to use them, and we have enough computing grunt to make them do really interesting things. But they're "not…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sure this is pretty proprietary information, but I do wonder what the value add of the AI-targeting is. Is it a relatively small bonus on top of a solid platform and audience for ads? Or is it the killer feature?
Recently I searched Amazon to read reviews of a book I bought on Kindle a few years ago. Now every website with Amazon affiliate advertising is showing me ads for that book. Considering that Amazon could have run a simple account search to determine that I am definitely not interested in seeing ads for a product that I already own, I think that the AI-targeting ad revolution is a while off yet. That is unrelated to G…
A lot of assumptions we make don't hold up when you start gathering real data.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Alphabet has failed at military robots: http://m.theregister.co.uk/2015/12/29/us_marines_kill_off_bi...
In fact they didn't fail at all. Google had no intentions of going forward with military robots. They were very clear about that when they acquired Boston Dynamics.