When the text starts with "Is there any work left to be done?" The short answer is an emphatic “Yes!” I was sort of hoping they would announce that pinterest will now be banned from all non-image search results...
Instead it's an announcement that Google has made a new, even bigger, pile of linear algebra that can sort of answer questions and won't end up like Watson.
I like that they put in a deadpan bit about how they are very ethical when they make and then exploit their huge collections of data found by their spiders. There sure hasn't been any AI controversy at google this quarter, no sir-e!
Oddly: seems like this might be a place for Google to put its natural language processing skills to work. If they can figure out WTF a product, excuse me, solution page is about, you're in reasonably good hands. Maybe.
"So .. Google have these data. Their hacking chops are not unremarkable. What have they done with it? Well, basically, you can ask for a word and they'll find other pages that feature that word ..."
There's actually a lot more that's done with it. Google Flu Trends. Google Zeitgeist. Google Squared. Google Suggest. Refinements. Spelling suggestions. Sitelinks. Wonder Wheel. Everything on Labs.
The limiting factor is more the ability to present the data to users without making them confused. It's pretty easy to run an analysis and get some data, but pretty difficult to figure "Okay, what problem does this solve?" and get that data in front of users in a way that actually solves the problem.
"When I tell people I work on Google Search, I’m sometimes asked, "Is there any work left to be done?" The short answer is an emphatic “Yes!”
Hands up everyone who is 100% satisfied with Search ... ... OK no one.
So now we have an unsolved problem left behind in favour of ... chat about mountains ...
"MUM has the potential to transform how Google helps you with complex tasks. Like BERT, MUM is built on a Transformer architecture, but it’s 1,000 times more powerful. MUM not only understands language, but also generates it."
Piss off and while you are at it, get BERT to explain my response to MUM or vice versa.
If MUM can decipher my immediately prior sentence given this input then I might start to get interested.
"I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next." -Eric Schmidt
I'm amused by the implication that if Google has even one piece of incorrect information in its knowledge corpus, it's justified in returning absolutely any answer to any question. You can deduce anything from a contradiction, after all.
Terri Gross: Now I'll tell you, in preparing for this, I decided, let me Google Google, so I typed in "Google" into the Google search, and I came up with a lot of Google things in the regular search, but in the "Are you feeling lucky?" search, I got nothing.
Larry Page: Well you just got Google itself.
TG: Yeah, I just got Google itself. Oh, I see, Google was giving me itself.
LP: Yeah.
TG: Oh.
LP: In computer science, we call that recursion. [laugh].
TG: Oh, you even have a name for it. [laugh]. I didn't quite get that. I kept thinking it was just repeating itself. I didn't realize it was giving me itself. [laugh].
LP: [laugh]
TG: And what's the name for it?
LP: Uh, recursion. It's... kind of... Sergey is giving me a dirty look.
TG: Why?
LP: It's a loose definition. [laugh]
TG: Lighten up Sergey. [laugh]
LP: It's a loose interpretation of... [laugh]... recursion.
TG: Sergey, what's the more literal interpretation?
Instead it's an announcement that Google has made a new, even bigger, pile of linear algebra that can sort of answer questions and won't end up like Watson.
I like that they put in a deadpan bit about how they are very ethical when they make and then exploit their huge collections of data found by their spiders. There sure hasn't been any AI controversy at google this quarter, no sir-e!
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