Submitted via IRC for FatPhil
Nature. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The Journal of the American Medical Association.
These are some the most elite academic journals in the world. And last year, one tech company, Alphabet's Google, published papers in all of them.
The unprecedented run of scientific results by the Mountain View search giant touched on everything from ophthalmology to computer games to neuroscience and climate models. For Google, 2016 was an annus mirabilis during which its researchers cracked the top journals and set records for sheer volume.
Behind the surge is Google's growing investment in artificial intelligence, particularly "deep learning," a technique whose ability to make sense of images and other data is enhancing services like search and translation (see "10 Breakthrough Technologies 2013: Deep Learning").
According to the tally Google provided to MIT Technology Review, it published 218 journal or conference papers on machine learning in 2016, nearly twice as many as it did two years ago.
We sought out similar data from the Web of Science, a service of Clarivate Analytics, which confirmed the upsurge. Clarivate said that the impact of Google's publications, according to a measure of publication strength it uses, was four to five times the world average. Compared to all companies that publish prolifically on artificial intelligence, Clarivate ranks Google No. 1 by a wide margin.
Source: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603984/googles-ai-explosion-in-one-chart/
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday March 29 2017, @09:43PM (1 child)
but remember to get AI in some hands outside the elite, else you are digging your own grave. One thing is worse than Skynet (from YOUR POV), and it is AI in the hands of the most powerful meatbags.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday March 30 2017, @08:36PM
This is the problem with "Deep Learning" - it's being done on big, expensive, low access machines. It's being used to drive things like Google searches that are very accessible, but that's all "Cloud Based." The personal computer revolution happened when computers dropped in price below other common items like cars, and eventually television sets. The AI revolution is currently in the hands of the few, like computers were in the 1960s.
Nobody has made the investment to bring the costs of these "Deep Learning" devices down like happened with personal computers, the tech is there, but not the investor backing - why would they, when they can control the tech and effectively monitize it in its present form?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 30 2017, @12:08AM
They can certainly afford the research. Let's hope they do something good.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Thursday March 30 2017, @12:19PM (1 child)
How is "machine learning" different to Newton Raphson? It is just some optimisation routine. Stop calling it Artificial Intelligence.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday March 30 2017, @01:53PM
AI has come on in leaps and bounds in the last 4 years, neural nets have been given a new lease of life with modern deep learning algorithms, and much of that is because of google. (Although some of that by acquisition.)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves