On April 28, according to foreign media reports, artificial intelligence is a topic that Alphabet executives have repeatedly mentioned in their speeches recently. The latest open letter from company founder Sergey Brin is no exception, but it mentions possible flaws in artificial intelligence in terms of safety, work and fairness. Every year since going public in 2004, the company has released an open letter written by its two co-founders, Brin or Larry Page.
Machine learning and artificial intelligence have been mentioned before. But this year Brin detailed the recent boom in AI development, which he described as a "renaissance."
"The spring in artificial intelligence has been the most important development in computing of my life," wrote Brin, whose company has apparently revolutionized the way the world uses computers.
When Google was founded in 1998, Brin wrote, the machine learning technology born in the 1940s, known as artificial neural networks, was "a forgotten footnote in computer science." But today, this approach has been the driving force behind the recent rise and investment boom in artificial intelligence. In his open letter, Brin revealed a partial list of Alphabet's applications of neural networks, including tasks such as recognizing objects in self-driving cars, translating languages, captioning YouTube, diagnosing eye diseases, and even better neural networks.
Brin agrees that advances in computing power have made artificial intelligence possible. He said the custom AI chips running inside some of Google's machines are a million times more powerful than the Pentium II chips in Google's first server. In a piece of mathematical humor, he suggested that Google's quantum computing chips could one day be faster than existing computers, unimaginably faster.
As you might expect, Brin hopes Alphabet and others will find more uses for AI. But he also acknowledged the downsides the technology could bring. "This powerful tool also brings new issues and responsibilities," he wrote.
AI tools could change the nature and volume of work, and could also be used to manipulate groups, Brin said, which could prompt readers to think of Facebook's recent turmoil. Concerns about AI safety range from "sci-fi-style fears to recent issues such as self-driving car performance," Brin wrote.
All of this sounds possible to Google and the tech industry. At the same time, these market players are also going all out to extract profits from the field of artificial intelligence. Even some Google employees aren't sure the company is on the right track -- thousands signed a protest letter asking the company to boycott a contract with the U.S. Department of Defense to use machine learning for drone video analysis.
Brin didn't address the issue, instead summarizing the downsides of AI with relative relief. He mentioned in the letter the company's partnership with the artificial intelligence group Partnership on AI, as well as Alphabet's related research in areas such as how to make learning software not cheat, and how AI decisions can be more easily understood by humans. "I expect that machine learning technology will continue to advance rapidly and that Alphabet remains a leader -- both in technology and ethics," Brin wrote.
From: cnBeta