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Inside Google Brain

wired.com

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Re: Inside Google Brain

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does but it's unsorted.then post processed. If you show a child 1000 images or animals. Then show different photographs of animals. And tell the child what animal each animal photograph is, you can now go back to the original 1000 and the explained ones will likely be recognized dispute them never beig initially sorted, or modeled as such. Going from 5-10 to 1,000,000 is what computers have a problem with. They go…

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 correctly.

Reprocessing of already learned data as the scheme of the world changes based on new information.

Re: Inside Google Brain

#52

>About a year later, Google had reduced Android’s voice recognition error rate by an astounding 25 percent. lol. This is the grand payoff?

While I'm not sure, I assume the author is referring to "error reduction". Error reduction is defined as

    def ER(accuracy_before, accuracy_after):
        delta = accuracy_after - accuracy_before
        return delta / (1. - accuracy_before)
(It is often written as a percentage.) Note that ER(.5, .75) = ER(.98, .99) = .5. It is for this reason I dislike it. Without knowing what performance before and after was like, it's hard to tell whether this was an incremental improvement to an already impressive system or the innovation that made a system useable.

(It strikes me as unlikely that the author means to say that Google reduced the Android recognizer's word error rate [WER] by 25%, since WERs on many publicly available databases used for evaluation purposes were already well below 25% before the deep learning revolution. But, it is not impossible that Google's test set was particularly hard and the pre-deep-learning Android recognizer was unimpressive. Caveat: I know, I know, WER isn't really "accuracy".)

Re: Inside Google Brain

#55
post #53
post #46

These Wired click-bait headlines are terrible.

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.

Re: Inside Google Brain

#56
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.

Re: Inside Google Brain

#58
post #53
post #46

These Wired click-bait headlines are terrible.

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

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!

Re: Inside Google Brain

#59

"This form of internal code-sharing has already helped another cutting-edge Google technology called MapReduce catch fire." Map-Reduce is not a Google technology.

I believe it is. Obviously map and reduce operations have existed for a long time, but MapReduce was Google's work, before it was popularize by hadoop and friends. Soon after MapReduce became popular, there was a paper published (by non-googlers) which 'described' the algorithm and poked some fun at the terminology:

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/1669

Re: Inside Google Brain

#60
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 revenue.

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