Sundar Pichai says the future of Google is AI. But Can He Fix the Algorithm?

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: October 5, 2017 at 10:56:09 AM EDT
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Sundar Pichai says the future of Google is AI. But Can He Fix the Algorithm?
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> Sundar Pichai says the future of Google is AI. But Can He Fix the Algorithm?
> ‘We feel huge responsibility’ to get information right
> By Dieter Bohn
> Oct 4 2017
> <https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/4/16405174/ceo-sundar-pichai-interview-google-ai-artificial-intelligence-interface>
>
> Unbeknownst to me, at the very moment on Monday morning when I was asking Google CEO Sundar Pichai about the biggest 
> ethical concern for AI today, Google's algorithms were promoting misinformation about the Las Vegas shooting. 
>
> I was asking in the context of the aftermath of the 2016 election and the misinformation that companies like 
> Facebook, Twitter, and Google were found to have spread. Pichai, I found out later, had a rough idea that something 
> was going wrong with one of his algorithms as we were speaking. So his answer, I think it's fair to say, also serves 
> as a response to the widespread criticisms the company faced in the days after the shooting.
>
> "I view it as a big responsibility to get it right," he says. "I think we'll be able to do these things better over 
> time. But I think the answer to your question, the short answer and the only answer, is we feel huge responsibility." 
> Later, he added, "Today, we overwhelmingly get it right. But I think every single time we stumble. I feel the pain, 
> and I think we should be held accountable."
>
> Learning about Google's "stumble" after we talked put some of our conversation in a different light. I was there to 
> talk about how Pichai’s project to realign the entire company to an "AI-first" footing was going in the lead-up to 
> Google's massive hardware event. Google often seems like the leader in weaving AI into its products; that’s certainly 
> Pichai’s relentless focus. But it’s worth questioning whether Google’s systems are making the right decisions, even 
> as they make some decisions much easier.
>
> When the subject isn't the failure of its news algorithms, Pichai is enthusiastic about AI. There’s not much 
> difference between an enthusiastic Sundar Pichai and a quiet, thoughtful Sundar Pichai, but you get a sense of it 
> when he names a half-dozen Google products that have been improved by its deep learning systems off the top of his 
> head.
>
> Google's lead in doing clever, innovative things with AI is impressive, and the examples Pichai cites can sometimes 
> even verge on inspiring — but there's clearly still work to do.
>
> Most executives talk about AI like it's just another thing that's included in the box or in its cloud; it's a 
> buzzword, a tick box on a spec sheet slotted in right after the processor. But Pichai is intent on pressing Google's 
> advantage in AI — not just by integrating AI features into every product it makes, but by making products that are 
> themselves inspired by AI, products that wouldn't be conceivable without it.
>
> There's no better example of that than Google Clips, a tiny little camera that automatically captures seven-second 
> moving photos of things it finds "interesting." It's a new way to think about photography, one that leverages 
> Google's ability to do lots of different AI tasks: recognize faces, recognize "bad" photos, recognize "interesting" 
> content. It's simply applied to your own pictures instead of content on the internet.
>
> Clips does all this locally: nothing is sent to the cloud, and nothing integrates with whatever Google Photos knows 
> about you. As much as Google is known for doing its AI in the cloud, many of the devices it's releasing are doing AI 
> locally. Pichai says that's by design, and that both kinds of AI are necessary. "A hybrid approach absolutely makes 
> sense," he says. "We will thoughtfully invest in both. Depending on the context, depending on what you're dealing 
> with, it'll make sense to deploy it differently."
>
> Clips is the kind of thing Pichai wants Google to do more of. "I made a deliberate decision to name the hardware 
> product with [a] software name," he says. "The reason we named it Clips is that the more exciting part of it is … the 
> machine learning, the computer vision work we do underneath the scenes." 
>
> For Google, making hardware is about selling products, but it's also about learning how hardware can better integrate 
> AI. "It's really tough to drive the future of computing forward if you're not able to think about these things 
> together," Pichai says. Fundamentally, his question about every hardware product is "how do we apply AI to rethink 
> our products?" He doesn't want to make AI just another feature, he wants AI to fundamentally alter what each device 
> is.
>
> [snip]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/
> Twitter: https://twitter.com/wa8dzp



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