An overview of Google’s Deep Mind Artificial Intelligence Technology – The Disruption has begun Part I
The industry is experiencing the successful development and demonstration of general purpose AI. Its name is ‘AlphaGo’, and Google’s Deep Mind division makes it. The AphaGo AI algorithm beats a human at the world’s hardest game. This has been a historic moment in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence.
Let us understand what exactly Google Deep Mind is? Where did it come from and what can the company’s artificial intelligence do. A computer program beat a master human brain of the ancient Chinese war game ‘Go’. It’s not the first time that the machine humbles a grandmaster but what makes AlphaGo different is its first demonstration that machines can truly learn and think in a human way. AlphaGo’s victory shocked the experts in the AI community. Many thought such an event was at least a decade away.
A victory of a program over a human in the ancient board game has sparked intrigue and in some cases concern. It demonstrates that a machine has approximated a human intuition and outsmarted the best human brain in the game. It’s something that the scientists hadn’t expected to happen for at least another decade, and it’s a giant leap for AI showing that the machines can learn on their own.
So, firstly a few questions – What does AlphaGo’s victory mean? AlpaGo demonstrates that machines can really learn. How does it work? – Instead of using brute force to calculate all the moves that could make like previous AI’s, AlphaGo used reinforcement learning and neural networks to mimic the learning process of the human brain. Keep in mind that the ancient Chinese game has many more possible moves than the chess as there are atoms in the entire universe. So, there is no way of calculating every possible move on the board, that’s practically impossible.
For this reason, Go is the holy grail of AI and learning to do such a task from scratch is a huge feat. Further to this, the DeepMind ’s creators say that the algorithm can learn many more things without alteration or guidance. In other words, the AI is general purpose. According to Demis Hassabis – DeepMind Co-founder, “The scientists always used to talk about what if they could eventually crack Go and have a program that could be the world champion, then they must have invented some generic general-purpose algorithm. So, maybe they’re on the cusp of all of them if you ask a great Go player why they play the particular move. Sometimes they’ll tell you it felt right. So in one way you can think of it, that Go is a much more intuitive game, whereas, chess is a much more logic based game.
Therefore, What is Google’s DeepMind? – Google DeepMind is a British Artificial Intelligence company that was founded in September of 2010 as DeepMind Technologies and was renamed when Google acquired it in 2014 for 500 million dollars. Interestingly enough this was just after the Facebook had just finished negotiations with them in 2013. The other fact is that Elon Musk is an investor in the company who is keeping an eye on them.
DeepMind received the company of the year award by the Cambridge Computer Laboratory in 2014. So, where did the DeepMind come from? DeepMind was first a start-up co-founded by Demis Hassabis in 2010. Demis was a child genius of sorts who went from being a chess prodigy and reaching a master level at age 13 on to becoming a lead programmer of Lion head studios for groundbreaking games such as Black & White. Post which he started his own gaming studio before leaving to complete some further studies at the University College of London. That is where he met the future co-founders of DeepMind in 2010.
It all begins from a single origin a unique point in space and time. This is the spark of innovation that fuels your most amazing breakthroughs. It’s a passion for discovery that unveiled the genesis of all that exists in the universe today the power of AI helps computers achieve superhuman capabilities in image recognition and lets scientists save our most precious resources by analysing in one month what used to take ten years. Devices translate even the most complex languages from voice into text and images into words.
AI is now helping the visually impaired recognize an old friend or letting a blind woman read to her child for the first time, autonomous vehicles give us the freedom to reimagine our city streets and travel where there are no streets at all or to help the lost find their way home. We see robots keeps themselves to perform simple tasks. We even watch in awe as they take their first steps and today a 2500-year-old game meets its match as a computer competes with one of the greatest human champions of all time and wins this is the collective imagination fueled by forward-looking technologies and the beginning of the most amazing discoveries which is yet to come to you.
To summarise, Deep learning is the fastest-growing field in artificial intelligence, helping computers make sense of infinite amounts of data in the form of images, sound, and text. Using multiple levels of neural networks, computers now have the capacity to see, learn, and react to complex situations as well or better than humans. Every industry will be impacted by deep learning, and many businesses are already delivering new products and services based on this new way of thinking about data and technology.
