Google is getting scary...

[daqq]

Hi guys,

Google acquired another company:

http://recode.net/2014/01/26/exclusive-google-to-buy-artificial-intelligence-startup-deepmind-for-400m/

Apparently, it's an AI company, their site lacks any info on their products... or any info at all: http://www.deepmind.com/

Now... together with their recent acquisition of Nest and Boston Dynamics, I'm not sure what you can get out of combining that together... perhaps an intelligent house populated by intelligent robots that will do nothing all day but watch ads?

David

[EEVblog]

Now... together with their recent acquisition of Nest and Boston Dynamics, I'm not sure what you can get out of combining that together... perhaps an intelligent house populated by intelligent robots that will do nothing all day but watch ads?

Either that, or it's all just a big waste of money.
Google just like to throw money against the wall and see what sticks.
Like their projects, maybe 90%+ of their acquisitions will just be a waste of money.

[c4757p]

They are casting their nets incredibly wide. Seems to me that a company with no focus is likely to die soon

[EEVblog]

Seems to me that a company with no focus is likely to die soon

No chance. They have big fat cash cows that will happily milk for the foreseeable future.

[Polossatik]

Seems to me that a company with no focus is likely to die soon

No chance. They have big fat cash cows that will happily milk for the foreseeable future.

indeed
if you don't have to worry about a few million $$, at least have fun and buy/invest in some crazy stuff. I know i would
It might be the next golden egg and if not it might be just fun or trigger some silly other idea .

As long as they keep the cow itself focused to eat the green grass all is fine , keep milking.

[Tinkerer]

Google has bought like half a dozen robotics companies in the last year or so. I think they are up to something. When investing that much in a field like this, something is bound to come out of it, whether it makes them money or not.

[EEVblog]

if you don't have to worry about a few million $$, at least have fun and buy/invest in some crazy stuff. I know i would

Sure. But that $3.2BN they paid for Nest buys a LOT of "crazy stuff" companies! Yet they blew that huge wad on one piss-ant company.
It's not that google bought Nest, why not, but it's that they paid at least 10 times over what would have been deemed a crazy amount, taking it into the bat-shit crazy stratosphere.

[XOIIO]

Google die out soon? 

They are pretty well set, and I think are making some smart moves with the companies they are snapping up. They pretty much own the internet.

Of course, not all of us may remember but Google's motto was "Don't be evil", but at this point they could practically change the definition of evil. Skynet anyone? 

Just think, in the coming years, google streetview arrangements on Amazon Delivery style drones, filling major cities, tracking population movement, perhaps targeting ads on video billboards at specific times of day when a segment of the population is doing something.

If you watch almost human, it could be like the ad tracking software that was used for a "smart bullet", I can see that happening eventually.

[Hydrawerk]

Yes, it is scary.

[XOIIO]

Yes, it is scary.

Windows XP, that definitely is scary!

You have to keep in mind that these results are because of the "not so clever" people using google, not google itself. I mean seriously, dogs? wtf

[Kjelt]

Perhaps they just wanted the people that worked there if you read the article google was a competitor for the same human resources.
Or it is about their patent portfolio.
Also if you buy the company you can steer the direction of the research from general-purpose learning algorithms for games towards multiple step ahead searching algorithms. It is like playing chess, can you predict the next 6 possible steps of your opponent? If google could do that by seeing that for instance a user searches two times in a row for something similar, they can combine that two searches and extrapolate to guess what the user was really searching for.
Although they are currently the nr1 search engine they have to keep up innovating like all other companies otherwise their fate will be the same as Altavista which once was the nr 1.

[GEuser]

http://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/mt/archives/2009/04/google_quietly.php

I'm sure I can recall that it used to be Don't Do ? , but since I cannot recall yesterday its a moot point .


SkyNet is a coming , even though its already here 

[roboticsound]

Definitely skynet....

Sent from my HTC One S using Tapatalk 2

[xrunner]

Definitely skynet....

Well it's coming sooner or later might as well get it over with.

[GEuser]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2548355/Google-sets-artificial-intelligence-ethics-board-curb-rise-robots.html

People robots are better than robot robots .

Don't do **** , the pot calling the kettle black , and if they know what **** is and i don't , so who or what Is!, I'm up to speed ...

[Terabyte2007]

Now... together with their recent acquisition of Nest and Boston Dynamics, I'm not sure what you can get out of combining that together... perhaps an intelligent house populated by intelligent robots that will do nothing all day but watch ads?

Either that, or it's all just a big waste of money.
Google just like to throw money against the wall and see what sticks.
Like their projects, maybe 90%+ of their acquisitions will just be a waste of money.

I agree with you Dave, I think I saw a forum post or maybe it was a blog article about the many failures of Google. You only really hear about or see the successful ones, but the others are just archived in the big bin of FAIL!

[zapta]

Google just like to throw money against the wall and see what sticks.

One of the walls was in Australia. Did not stick.

http://google-au.blogspot.com/2009/05/went-walkabout-brought-back-google-wave.html

;-)

[TerraHertz]

http://9gag.com/gag/awr1R4R

Google is certainly taking a consistent direction.

[lemmegraphdat]

Definitely skynet....

Well it's coming sooner or later might as well get it over with.

They'll just access our software and make us them.

[PetrosA]

Google potentially has incredible power within their reach. They have two formidable strengths: Pretty much all of human inquisitiveness passes through their gates, and they have access to the most advanced computing to connect the dots of that inquisitiveness.

Sure, there are humans asking whether you can get pregnant from a dog, but there are also scientists and researchers all over the world asking questions of google. Knowing what questions the most intelligent human beings are asking is a priceless advantage...

[EEVblog]

Sure, there are humans asking whether you can get pregnant from a dog, but there are also scientists and researchers all over the world asking questions of google. Knowing what questions the most intelligent human beings are asking is a priceless advantage...

How do you differentiate the intelligent from the non-intelligent?
Having 100,000,000 Yanks searching for "young earth creation" doesn't make it an intelligent question...

[Rerouter]

I myself would hold no issue with relevance feedback on obscure searches, where you could tell the search engine its not what your after :/

too many times its taken well into the double digits of results pages to find something because its assumed the wrong context which can be hard to filter out, (bloody movie names!)

[PetrosA]

Sure, there are humans asking whether you can get pregnant from a dog, but there are also scientists and researchers all over the world asking questions of google. Knowing what questions the most intelligent human beings are asking is a priceless advantage...

How do you differentiate the intelligent from the non-intelligent?
Having 100,000,000 Yanks searching for "young earth creation" doesn't make it an intelligent question...

As I'm watching the Nye/Ham debate, I wholeheartedly agree that even 1 billion Yanks searching for "young earth creation" wouldn't make it an intelligent question I also feel for all rational thinking Aussies who have to watch Ham make a fool of himself...

My thought about differentiating the intelligent from the non-intelligent questions, at least for a first iteration filter, would be the IP addresses of searches. I'm sure Google knows what groups of addresses belong to various scientific communities and they could certainly put more weight to searches originating from those addresses. They also know what questions are coming out of businesses, marketing agencies, etc. Not all searches from Cern or Nasa or various universities around the world will be intelligent, but they would be a valid starting point.

[zapta]

How do you differentiate the intelligent from the non-intelligent?
Having 100,000,000 Yanks searching for "young earth creation" doesn't make it an intelligent question...

Note to self: ignore nationalist baiting.

[TerraHertz]

How do you differentiate the intelligent from the non-intelligent?
Having 100,000,000 Yanks searching for "young earth creation" doesn't make it an intelligent question...

Bingo! This is not the question, it's the answer.
If google *could* automatically filter the intelligent questions from the stupid questions, think what that would do to the commercial value of their search terms stream.

Is this the reason for Google's focus on AI, and home monitoring? How much easier would it be to sort the intelligent from the stupid, if you have access to their home activity patterns?


Or there's the Paranoia Transform, in which Google's #1 objective is not to make money, but to make a kill-list of people who ask the wrong questions.