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from the google-is-so-smart-it-can-maek-typos-for-us dept.
The NY Times covers in a very in-depth article Google's contribution to the recent revolution in deep learning through its application in Google Translation. A great read that covers the journey from new theories to practice in less than 10 years. This piece is surprising very technical as it tries to explains the history, the people and the technology behind the recent AI revolution. Take the time to read the full story here.
It is, in fact, three overlapping stories that converge in Google Translate's successful metamorphosis to A.I. — a technical story, an institutional story and a story about the evolution of ideas. The technical story is about one team on one product at one company, and the process by which they refined, tested and introduced a brand-new version of an old product in only about a quarter of the time anyone, themselves included, might reasonably have expected. The institutional story is about the employees of a small but influential artificial-intelligence group within that company, and the process by which their intuitive faith in some old, unproven and broadly unpalatable notions about computing upended every other company within a large radius. The story of ideas is about the cognitive scientists, psychologists and wayward engineers who long toiled in obscurity, and the process by which their ostensibly irrational convictions ultimately inspired a paradigm shift in our understanding not only of technology but also, in theory, of consciousness itself.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 19 2016, @02:44AM
As one of the elderly folks on these here interwebs, I'm constantly entertained by how old news becomes new again.
Back in the 1970s, IBM produced a translate computer (yes, a refrigerator sized dedicated machine) to convert English to Chinese and vice versa. When the CEO arrived to test it. he entered "Out of sight, out of mind." The machine translated into Chinese, which he couldn't read, so he entered that into the machine to translate back into English. The machine responded "Invisible idiot."
He instructed them to keep working on it. And here we are.
To be fair, my CS professors also told us that voice recognition would not, could not happen in our lifetimes. They laughed out loud at Lorne Green talking to his terminal on Battle Star Galactica.
Hello, Siri?
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Monday December 19 2016, @08:33AM
Nice anecdote, but we've kept working on it.
Google Translate: Out of sight, out of mind -> 看不见，不在乎。-> Can not see, do not care.
That's pretty good, in my opinion. If anyone has some Chinese translations before the new Translate AI, it'd be fun to look at, as it used to be completely unusable.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday December 21 2016, @04:48AM
I think there is some incredibly important and new news here. Google Translate made more improvements by switching to their new machine learning and TPU approach (TPUs being a story in and of themselves [soylentnews.org]) in just a few months than in the preceding decade (they gave a metric for measuring the improvement - the BLEU score). And those improvements are coming to a wide range of similar computer-human-world interaction tasks. The massive improvements being made to Google Translate are being made despite the fact that no intelligence is involved. It's still just a pattern-finding algorithm.
The TPU and machine learning revolution over at Google might be the biggest tech story of the decade, and it's unfolding right in front of our eyes.
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