20 ms·

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.

by shimon 11y ago

rimantas 11y ago
AI with quickly advancing dementia.
drewrv 11y ago
AI is whatever hasn't been done yet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect#AI_is_whatever_hasn.27t_been_done_yet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect#AI_is_whatever_hasn....
- taneq 11y ago
  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. It would seem that only True Scotsmen are intelligent.
  - dhimes 11y ago
    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.
    - tajen 11y ago
      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.
      - unprepare 11y ago
        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!)
  - danharaj 11y ago
    It's more like, we know what 'intelligent' is, but it's hard to quantify, so we try to find problems that we think are at least as hard as 'intelligence'. when we solve those problems and the solutions don't resemble 'intelligence', we move on. it may be the case that 'intelligent' is just a word used to make humans feel special things about mammalian brains, but it's also consistent that we overestimate the difficulty of the abilities that add up to 'intelligent'. It's the difference between moving the goal posts and having our perspective changed so that we realize that the goal is further away than we thought.
  - tinalumfoil 11y ago
    The problem with calling anything AI is that it's such a meaningless word in the context of computers. According to Wikipedia AI is "intelligence exhibited by machines or software" and Merriam Webster define intelligence as "the ability to learn" so I'd say we hit AI long ago. I'd follow the meaning further but I hate arguing definitions. To put it another way, if we define a Scotsman as anyone born in Scotland and/or related to someone born in Scotland, we've essentially just defined a Scotsman as every organism ever to be alive on Earth. I have to imagine when the term first started to be used people imagined an AI as something more human than neural networks. Imagine HAL or any other hollywood perceived robot.
    - derefr 11y ago
      I take the term AI to mean "a thing that people will actually acknowledge as being AI when it exists"—something that can only be defined retrospectively, but which still is a workable definition in that you can sort of predict what people will or won't want to have "wasted" the eventual definition of the term on. My personal bet is on people placing that line squarely on the divide between "Stoic Guru" and "Active Academy" UX models[1]. An AI is probably, to most people, an agent that continues to think and learn when it is not being interacted with—by surfing the internet, maybe—such that it can generate novel outputs, and revise its own previous beliefs, with no user-visible step that would be perceived as "re-training." Something that will come to you with thoughts it has had that you'll find relevant, that were inspired by new data the agent has acquired not derived from your input. A simple example that people would probably think of as "AI" (and which people wouldn't accept as a UX paradigm unless it was presented to them through an agent-based interface) would be a spam filter like GMail's that learns from the classifications of everyone who uses it, that would go back and reclassify messages that it now had a more refined opinion on. Nobody would want a dumb algorithm to take emails that "were" in their inbox and move them over into their spam folder—that's destructive!—but they'd accept a (virtual) secretary using their judgement to do so. Thus, AI. [1] https://scifiinterfaces.wordpress.com/category/active-academy/ https://scifiinterfaces.wordpress.com/category/active-academ...
      - jpatokal 11y ago
  - ubernostrum 11y ago
    Many things would have blown the socks off people of a previous time. That doesn't make them all AI, especially since many of the results we see today are not due to novel techniques a ten-years-ago AI researcher wouldn't have known about, but rather to ten years' worth of advancement in refining the techniques and in the availability of computing power to use those techniques with. A lot of it is just "yeah, if we could've got X to run that fast or had that many processors to throw at it, we'd have had that back then". So if you want to describe Google as a (insert thing here) company, really the thing to insert in the parentheses would be something like "massive computing infrastructure". And for better or worse, "AI" is still associated in many people's minds with things that the Google search box isn't close to resembling. People expect an AI to hold a conversation, or be able to reach (and explain) novel conclusions, rather than heuristically guess the next word you'll type (given the computing power, not terribly hard given the informational entropy of human languages) or scan a large database quickly to return the result you asked for. People mostly don't see fast brute-force searching of a problem space, for example, as "intelligence", but that's most of the secret sauce behind game-playing "AI".
    - deciplex 11y ago
      Even within the last six months I've seen very confident posts here to the effect of "an AI that is worth a damn at go is still at least 10 years off".
      - ubernostrum 11y ago
        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.
        adrianN 11y ago
        Just like James Watt's steam engine was just a refinement of Thomas Newcomen's model and yet fundamentally changed the industrial landscape in Europe.
  - pjbrunet 11y ago
    "The game of chess, is like a swordfight. You must think first, before you move." -Wu-Tang Clan
    - yunti 11y ago
      :)
  - moonchrome 11y ago
    >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 assistants (not something trivial like Siri) by now.
    - taneq 11y ago
      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.
    - ultramancool 11y ago
      Yes, where is this blow your socks off natural language processing? Certainly nothing I've ever used has contained it. The best I see is shitty voice recognition which can't understand me 75% of the time and often terrible attempts to chop questions out into search queries.
  - dilemma 11y ago
    A computer running a chess program isn't intelligent because it isn't sentient. It is just doing what it's been told to.
    - oilywater 11y ago
      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.
      - dilemma 11y ago
        The human mind isn't software so you're missing the point.
        stevenhuang 11y ago
        Actually, the computational theory of mind is well regarded in modern cognitive science: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_theory_of_mind https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_theory_of_mind
      - taneq 11y ago
        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
- rpgmaker 11y ago
  Related: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-man-who-would-teach-machines-to-think/309529/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-man-...
- mangeletti 11y ago
  Very interesting. Thanks. This concept seems to be a direct abstraction of hindsight bias. In fact, the concept of hindsight bias feels very much like every aspect of life, also. As soon as you build the next great tower, you opt for a new wave of bigger, more powerful enemies (i.e., you level up), and so the solution for the last wave no longer feels that interesting anymore, and thus seems, perhaps, obvious.
drewda 11y ago
Google's flagship product, in the sense of revenue, is the text ad ;-)
- endtime 11y ago
  The text ad which is targeted using AI?
  - scarmig 11y ago
    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?
    - dcw303 11y ago
      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 Google, but I haven't seen anything there that would suggest they are running anything smarter.
      - chm 11y ago
        I have the same experience. On my machine, only Safari is "vanilla" - other browsers have various levels of ad/js blocking. So the only time I see ads is in Safari. I can't believe they're still feeding me Newegg ads for components that I already own and have bought from Newegg. I understand that's not as trivial a problem as it sounds, but I can't help but think companies are overpaying for ads.
        ethbro 11y ago
        To be fair, Google is in the business of making money on ads. If the customer wants to throw money on a stupid ad buy, then that's not particularly their concern.
pessimizer 11y ago
Is grep AI?
- tempestn 11y ago
  Google search has moved _far_ beyond grep.
- minwcnt5 11y ago
  No. Obviously.
- bbq 11y ago
  If you let me know how you use grep to search the internet as effectively as I do with Google, sure!
  - rokhayakebe 11y ago
    Effectively or Efficiently? I can search the internet way better. Email me what you are looking for and 9 times out of 10 I will send you back something better than what Google will spit out. Furthermore you won't even have to sift through 10 links, or change your search, I will do all this and send you the result back.
    - ikawe 11y ago
      I bet you'll use google to do it.
      - rokhayakebe 11y ago
        Taking the most expensive keywords as a source: Attorneys, Insurance, Travel, etc... I'll use SuperLawyers + Avvo + Yelp for Attorneys. I'll go directly to insurance websites and compare rates. I'll go to Kayak, CheapOAir, Hipmunk and the likes for travel.
    - robotresearcher 11y ago
      Using grep?
toomanybeersies 11y ago
Google's flagship product is an advertising platform, not a search box.
- Kequc 11y ago
  Even that one feeds ads it thinks are relevant to you
  - coldtea 11y ago
    And judging from the quality of those feeds, I'd call it AS (artificial stupidity) not AI.
    - esun 11y ago
      Well it's smarter than running ads in newspapers, which generated a half-trillion dollars of revenue over a century.
      - ninkendo 11y ago
        Assuming you're correct, that means the whole market for google's primary revenue source took a century to bring in what Apple makes in 2 years. Really goes to show how much the market works on the 2nd derivative, and how that can result in immensely disproportionate market caps relative to a company's profitability. If I were Apple I would think about seriously ramping up the stock buyback at this point. If they keep it up long enough they could even take themselves private one day.
- bunderbunder 11y ago
  Either way you cut it (search or advertising), Google's flagship product's success depends critically on their ability to do machine learning better than other people.
- ehnto 11y ago
  I would be inclined to say search is still their flagship. While advertising is their monetary powerhouse, it is still search that leads their fleet of products as a household name.
iainmerrick 11y ago
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 IBM an AI company?
- derefr 11y ago
  > Is IBM an AI company? That's how they've decided to brand themselves, at least (as of ~four months ago): http://adage.com/article/datadriven-marketing/ibm-replaces-smarter-planet-cognitive-business-strategy/300774/ http://adage.com/article/datadriven-marketing/ibm-replaces-s...
- cowsandmilk 11y ago
  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.
  - toxican 11y ago
    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.
- mcv 11y ago
  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.
  - iainmerrick 11y ago
    But all that is true of Facebook and Amazon, say. 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.
johnchristopher 11y ago
Apple'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.
ionised 11y ago
I thought their flagship product was advertising space?

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.

by shimon 11y ago

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.

rimantas 11y ago

AI with quickly advancing dementia.

drewrv 11y ago

AI is whatever hasn't been done yet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect#AI_is_whatever_hasn.27t_been_done_yet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect#AI_is_whatever_hasn....

taneq 11y ago
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. It would seem that only True Scotsmen are intelligent.
- dhimes 11y ago
  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.
  - tajen 11y ago
    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.
    - unprepare 11y ago
      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!)
- danharaj 11y ago
  It's more like, we know what 'intelligent' is, but it's hard to quantify, so we try to find problems that we think are at least as hard as 'intelligence'. when we solve those problems and the solutions don't resemble 'intelligence', we move on. it may be the case that 'intelligent' is just a word used to make humans feel special things about mammalian brains, but it's also consistent that we overestimate the difficulty of the abilities that add up to 'intelligent'. It's the difference between moving the goal posts and having our perspective changed so that we realize that the goal is further away than we thought.
- tinalumfoil 11y ago
  The problem with calling anything AI is that it's such a meaningless word in the context of computers. According to Wikipedia AI is "intelligence exhibited by machines or software" and Merriam Webster define intelligence as "the ability to learn" so I'd say we hit AI long ago. I'd follow the meaning further but I hate arguing definitions. To put it another way, if we define a Scotsman as anyone born in Scotland and/or related to someone born in Scotland, we've essentially just defined a Scotsman as every organism ever to be alive on Earth. I have to imagine when the term first started to be used people imagined an AI as something more human than neural networks. Imagine HAL or any other hollywood perceived robot.
  - derefr 11y ago
    I take the term AI to mean "a thing that people will actually acknowledge as being AI when it exists"—something that can only be defined retrospectively, but which still is a workable definition in that you can sort of predict what people will or won't want to have "wasted" the eventual definition of the term on. My personal bet is on people placing that line squarely on the divide between "Stoic Guru" and "Active Academy" UX models[1]. An AI is probably, to most people, an agent that continues to think and learn when it is not being interacted with—by surfing the internet, maybe—such that it can generate novel outputs, and revise its own previous beliefs, with no user-visible step that would be perceived as "re-training." Something that will come to you with thoughts it has had that you'll find relevant, that were inspired by new data the agent has acquired not derived from your input. A simple example that people would probably think of as "AI" (and which people wouldn't accept as a UX paradigm unless it was presented to them through an agent-based interface) would be a spam filter like GMail's that learns from the classifications of everyone who uses it, that would go back and reclassify messages that it now had a more refined opinion on. Nobody would want a dumb algorithm to take emails that "were" in their inbox and move them over into their spam folder—that's destructive!—but they'd accept a (virtual) secretary using their judgement to do so. Thus, AI. [1] https://scifiinterfaces.wordpress.com/category/active-academy/ https://scifiinterfaces.wordpress.com/category/active-academ...
    - jpatokal 11y ago
- ubernostrum 11y ago
  Many things would have blown the socks off people of a previous time. That doesn't make them all AI, especially since many of the results we see today are not due to novel techniques a ten-years-ago AI researcher wouldn't have known about, but rather to ten years' worth of advancement in refining the techniques and in the availability of computing power to use those techniques with. A lot of it is just "yeah, if we could've got X to run that fast or had that many processors to throw at it, we'd have had that back then". So if you want to describe Google as a (insert thing here) company, really the thing to insert in the parentheses would be something like "massive computing infrastructure". And for better or worse, "AI" is still associated in many people's minds with things that the Google search box isn't close to resembling. People expect an AI to hold a conversation, or be able to reach (and explain) novel conclusions, rather than heuristically guess the next word you'll type (given the computing power, not terribly hard given the informational entropy of human languages) or scan a large database quickly to return the result you asked for. People mostly don't see fast brute-force searching of a problem space, for example, as "intelligence", but that's most of the secret sauce behind game-playing "AI".
  - deciplex 11y ago
    Even within the last six months I've seen very confident posts here to the effect of "an AI that is worth a damn at go is still at least 10 years off".
    - ubernostrum 11y ago
      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.
      - adrianN 11y ago
        Just like James Watt's steam engine was just a refinement of Thomas Newcomen's model and yet fundamentally changed the industrial landscape in Europe.
- pjbrunet 11y ago
  "The game of chess, is like a swordfight. You must think first, before you move." -Wu-Tang Clan
  - yunti 11y ago
    :)
- moonchrome 11y ago
  >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 assistants (not something trivial like Siri) by now.
  - taneq 11y ago
    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.
  - ultramancool 11y ago
    Yes, where is this blow your socks off natural language processing? Certainly nothing I've ever used has contained it. The best I see is shitty voice recognition which can't understand me 75% of the time and often terrible attempts to chop questions out into search queries.
- dilemma 11y ago
  A computer running a chess program isn't intelligent because it isn't sentient. It is just doing what it's been told to.
  - oilywater 11y ago
    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.
    - dilemma 11y ago
      The human mind isn't software so you're missing the point.
      - stevenhuang 11y ago
        Actually, the computational theory of mind is well regarded in modern cognitive science: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_theory_of_mind https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_theory_of_mind
    - taneq 11y ago
      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
rpgmaker 11y ago
Related: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-man-who-would-teach-machines-to-think/309529/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/11/the-man-...
mangeletti 11y ago
Very interesting. Thanks. This concept seems to be a direct abstraction of hindsight bias. In fact, the concept of hindsight bias feels very much like every aspect of life, also. As soon as you build the next great tower, you opt for a new wave of bigger, more powerful enemies (i.e., you level up), and so the solution for the last wave no longer feels that interesting anymore, and thus seems, perhaps, obvious.

drewda 11y ago

Google's flagship product, in the sense of revenue, is the text ad ;-)

endtime 11y ago
The text ad which is targeted using AI?
- scarmig 11y ago
  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?
  - dcw303 11y ago
    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 Google, but I haven't seen anything there that would suggest they are running anything smarter.
    - chm 11y ago
      I have the same experience. On my machine, only Safari is "vanilla" - other browsers have various levels of ad/js blocking. So the only time I see ads is in Safari. I can't believe they're still feeding me Newegg ads for components that I already own and have bought from Newegg. I understand that's not as trivial a problem as it sounds, but I can't help but think companies are overpaying for ads.
      - ethbro 11y ago
        To be fair, Google is in the business of making money on ads. If the customer wants to throw money on a stupid ad buy, then that's not particularly their concern.

pessimizer 11y ago

Is grep AI?

tempestn 11y ago
Google search has moved _far_ beyond grep.
minwcnt5 11y ago
No. Obviously.
bbq 11y ago
If you let me know how you use grep to search the internet as effectively as I do with Google, sure!
- rokhayakebe 11y ago
  Effectively or Efficiently? I can search the internet way better. Email me what you are looking for and 9 times out of 10 I will send you back something better than what Google will spit out. Furthermore you won't even have to sift through 10 links, or change your search, I will do all this and send you the result back.
  - ikawe 11y ago
    I bet you'll use google to do it.
    - rokhayakebe 11y ago
      Taking the most expensive keywords as a source: Attorneys, Insurance, Travel, etc... I'll use SuperLawyers + Avvo + Yelp for Attorneys. I'll go directly to insurance websites and compare rates. I'll go to Kayak, CheapOAir, Hipmunk and the likes for travel.
  - robotresearcher 11y ago
    Using grep?

toomanybeersies 11y ago

Google's flagship product is an advertising platform, not a search box.

Kequc 11y ago
Even that one feeds ads it thinks are relevant to you
- coldtea 11y ago
  And judging from the quality of those feeds, I'd call it AS (artificial stupidity) not AI.
  - esun 11y ago
    Well it's smarter than running ads in newspapers, which generated a half-trillion dollars of revenue over a century.
    - ninkendo 11y ago
      Assuming you're correct, that means the whole market for google's primary revenue source took a century to bring in what Apple makes in 2 years. Really goes to show how much the market works on the 2nd derivative, and how that can result in immensely disproportionate market caps relative to a company's profitability. If I were Apple I would think about seriously ramping up the stock buyback at this point. If they keep it up long enough they could even take themselves private one day.
bunderbunder 11y ago
Either way you cut it (search or advertising), Google's flagship product's success depends critically on their ability to do machine learning better than other people.
ehnto 11y ago
I would be inclined to say search is still their flagship. While advertising is their monetary powerhouse, it is still search that leads their fleet of products as a household name.

iainmerrick 11y ago

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 IBM an AI company?

derefr 11y ago
> Is IBM an AI company? That's how they've decided to brand themselves, at least (as of ~four months ago): http://adage.com/article/datadriven-marketing/ibm-replaces-smarter-planet-cognitive-business-strategy/300774/ http://adage.com/article/datadriven-marketing/ibm-replaces-s...
cowsandmilk 11y ago
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.
- toxican 11y ago
  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.
mcv 11y ago
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.
- iainmerrick 11y ago
  But all that is true of Facebook and Amazon, say. 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.

johnchristopher 11y ago

Apple'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.

ionised 11y ago

I thought their flagship product was advertising space?