Google and Its AI Crusade
October 24, 2017
The next big thing is, according to Google is that artificial intelligence “is just really difficult to do. Very few people can do it.”
How does one make more smart people? The answer is to create a “crash course” in artificial intelligence.
According to “Google Wants to Train Other Companies to Use Its AI Tools,”
Google will offer 15 hours of coding lessons and instructional videos from some marquee names in the field, like research director Peter Norvig. Google has tested the course with some universities, but hopes to train staff at large corporations in health, finance and other sectors.
Anyone remember how old fashioned classes used to work. The teacher would give a test and only a few people got top marks. None of that gold badge which said, “Also Participated.”
How many effective machine learning programmers will emerge from the Google program. Even Malcolm Gladwell pegs expertise at 10,000 hours. So with 15 hours of instruction, that’s only a few hours short for mastery.
But what if “Tensorflow Sucks” is spot on? The blog post states:
Take the React Javascript library as an example, the standard choice today for interactive web applications. In React, the complexity of how data flows through the application makes sense to be hidden from the developer, since Javascript execution is generally orders of magnitudes faster than updates to the DOM. React developers don’t want to worry about the mechanics of how state is propagated, so long as the end user experience is “good enough”.
Note the “good enough.” Cupcakes on maps. Pixel phone displays which are drab. The Google assertion about the end of lousy”poorly designed or poorly maintained deep learning frameworks.
Google wants to do better. With costs soaring for traffic, the Google needs a really big winner. Education it is. Just like the “free” Lexis and Westlaw for law students. Focus on the commercial solution because it is just, well, so much better than any other way to find what one needs quickly.
Instant AI and machine learning expertise sounds like a big PR program to get Google’s approach adopted in order to benefit the Google? Of course not, gentle reader.
Only if you Google them.
Stephen E Arnold, October 24, 2017
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