Have you ever thought Facebook’s facial recognition was a little creepy? Artificial Intelligence adds another level to that. If you search for a berry in the Google Photos app, it can find all berries in every photo you have on your system no matter how old the image is. Then, Google Photos can recognize all future berries in your photos.
Google uses an extremely powerful version of Artificial Intelligence called “deep learning”. Remember those crazy, acid trip looking photos we saw on Google a few months ago? That’s how Tensorflow sees the world and how it recognizes things from eyes, to trees, to food, to feelings, such as sadness or excitement.
What does this mean?
Google’s been using Tensorflow to add item detection, speech recognition, “Smart Reply” which answers your emails, and more to their software, but now (part of it) is open for anyone to use. Google did this because this enables researchers to build their machine learning systems much more easily, therefore making progress faster for everyone. Other companies such as Microsoft, Facebook, and Twitter have made leaps in Artificial Intelligence but Google’s is known as the most advanced. This puts Google in a great position because researchers want to learn the most advanced AI and then will be giving their findings back to Google.
What’s coming?
Google already has a Virtual Assistant app, but creative developers could make a more complex one that understands your speech, tone, and images to know what you need before you say it. For now, computers have a hard time recognizing an activity, for example, where a person is walking to and why. They also have a hard time seeming human and recognizing cues that come easy to us. However, this could all be in the past soon. This makes the question, “Will computers take over the earth?” something we could be seriously asking in the near future.
