via Google Research Blog on Allo (their new messaging app w/ AI built right in):
We utilize Google’s image recognition technology, developed by our Machine Perception team, to associate images with semantic entities — people, animals, cars, etc. We then apply a machine learned model that maps those recognized entities to actual natural language responses. Our system produces replies for thousands of entity types that are drawn from a taxonomy that is a subset of Google’s Knowledge Graph and may be at different granularity levels. For example, when you receive a photo of a dog, the system may detect that the dog is actually a labrador and suggest “Love that lab!”. Or given a photo of a pasta dish, it may detect the type of pasta (“Yum linguine!”) and even the cuisine (“I love Italian food!”).
This is the Information age in a nutshell:
- Computers the size of houses that handle complex calculations that today’s TI-83 can do 100 times as fast
- Networking these computers together
- Creating terminals that plug into these mainframe computers
- shrinking computers to fit into cars, watches, pockets, backpacks, television sets
- wired and wireless networking that connects every tiny computer together 24/7
- All the while, we have transferred everything we can to a digital format to the point now where everything is created digital first (CAD, Blueprints, Books, movies, music, thoughts) and then transferred to an analog medium (versus analog to digital a mere 15 years ago)
But something happened along the way. People stopped by computers and starting doing everything on tiny cell phones. Tiny cell phones that don’t do anything great. They aren’t great MP3 players or displays due to their size or speed or fast-networking or handling large files or really doing actual work on Because of their size, they’re difficult to type on but what they are good at is sending you millions of data points a minute, much faster than you can process them which means everyone is creating really crappy content since their sole computer is a tiny phone and everyone has to react to that content by a like, love, thumbs up, comment, re-post or share. Well, that’s hard to do because trillions of crappy photos are uploaded a minute now versus millions just a few years ago (millions of subjectively better photos since they were taken with real cameras – just to use one data point example).
IT’s hard to react to so many things per day on keyboards that are tiny and don’t offer any feedback to people who are actual typists so we now have AI that decides the best response based on the content we are viewing.
Eventually, it’ll just be bots talking to bots. That’s going to be awesome *sigh*