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How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- bricestacey 13y agoIt loads but you have to disable any ad blocker and install flash.
- youngerdryas 13y ago>Kurzweil eventually wants to help create a “cybernetic friend” that knows what you want before you do I am not sure I want that. At least not as much as Google does. Kurzweil is going to help me click on more ads. Shreds any sense of him being a visionary.
- jodrellblank 13y agoSurely it can also click the ads on your behalf, and save you needing to know about them at all?
- jkldotio 13y agoWorse than ads I think is the long-term (in civilizational terms) potential for this to be abused in the domain of politics.
- modarts 13y agoSounds like a Minority Report version of Clippy.
- anonymfus 13y agoIt's inverse. Clippy told people how to do their work more efficiently, and because people don't like to remember new ways of doing work if their old habits sufficient, people hate him. Clippy was like computerized supervisor, slave driver, who looked over their shoulders and told them "You selected one menu item 5 times, better use keyboard shortcut to mine more uranium for your Master." Google wants to tell people what to do. He is like missionary, every layman would respect him for making life easer. People would love Google for this.
- jaxytee 13y agoI'm 100% sure I don't want this. Exploration and discovery as a whole is one of the most rewarding experiences we have as humans. I don't want that outsourced to some machine/ algorithm. I addition to that, we deal with so much cognitive dissonance within our brains on a day to day, minute to minute, millisecond to millisecond basis, I'm not convinced Google (even with their massive cache of data on us) could even predict what we "want" anyhow. Think of youtube and it's "recommended for you" video suggestion. Just because I listen to Lil Boosie every now and then dosen't mean I want to hear all the shitty southern rap songs it's choosing for me.
- dpatrick86 13y agoI'm not in love with the personally tailored search experience as it stands. I'm totally OK with searching "#{my_city} taxi" instead of "taxi" if it means when I search "abortion" I get a sampling of search results that has the greatest co-citation... instead of something that myopically focuses on Google's perception of my preferences. At the least, I'd like to be able to switch off the personalization. But anyway... Beating a dead horse here in this community, I'm sure.
- fyi80 13y agoIf only there were a way to predict that users searching for "taxi" tend to want local results, and users searching for "abortion" don't. You know, like that other search engine does, called, um, Google: https://www.google.com/search?q=abortion https://www.google.com/search?q=abortion https://www.google.com/search?q=taxi https://www.google.com/search?q=taxi Or if you were willing to type more than 2 words into the search box before blaming Google for failing to read your mind, while you simultaneously tell Google to stop trying to read your mind.
- ryankey721 13y agoI believe he's trying to say that he doesn't want results tailored to him at all. For example, if I were republican, I'd tend to get anti-abortion material when searching. He seems to be saying that he'd be okay with typing in his city name to get local results in exchange for not having any personalization. In other words, it's beyond local vs non-local.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- nmridul 13y agoRead somewhere - "Its sad to see that all the best brains are working now just to make you and me click that Ad".
- SkyMarshal 13y agoJeff Hammerbacher. http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_17/b4225060960537.htm http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_17/b42250609...
- IvyMike 13y agoThe phrase 'cybernetic friend' brings back nightmares of Clippy and Rover the search dog.
- gavinh 13y agoI'm working on some open source projects that pertain to recognizing entailment in plain text. Entailment is the relation that holds when one text "follows from" another. For example, "Carolina beat Duke" follows from "Carolina defeated the Duke Blue Devils once again". I have a demo here: http://ec2-23-22-22-135.compute-1.amazonaws.com:8001/demo http://ec2-23-22-22-135.compute-1.amazonaws.com:8001/demo Here's an example app that uses entailment recognition to answer natural language polar (yes or no) questions: gavinmh.github.io/HelloTablet. I'd be happy to talk to anyone who is interested in getting involved.
- fchollet 13y agoI like your demo. Do you have references to papers that you used as a basis for your code?
- gavinh 13y agoThanks. It is based on http://nlp.stanford.edu/~wcmac/papers/nli-diss.pdf http://nlp.stanford.edu/~wcmac/papers/nli-diss.pdf. I use a simpler alignment representation, and use semantic role types in the predictions.
- rsync 13y agoAll grand plans indeed ... but a higher priority should be making search even work at all. Google search returns approximate results, related results, results with your words split (or joined) and other nonsense to drive ad views. Even using the so-called "power tools" like allinsite: and the (barely functional) quotation marks, you still get very shoddy results. Anyone who ever searches for very specific groups of terms knows exactly what I am talking about: enter search terms, click on result, search in page for term, doesn't exist.
- wslh 13y agoUse the verbatim mode in the search results. In this way Google returns results with all your terms.
- Lost_BiomedE 13y agoIs there a way to make this the default, so I don't have to click, search tools -> all results -> verbatim? Edit: Thanks, comex. Made google.com become: http://www.google.com/webhp?tbs=li:1 http://www.google.com/webhp?tbs=li:1
- comex 13y agoIf you use your browser to initiate searches (and aren't using Safari), it's just a matter of changing the search URL to add &tbs=li:1.
- Sven7 13y agoGoogle needs to create a search market place around that index of theirs. They need to open it up. Search is too big a problem for just a couple people at Mountain View to be working on. And at this stage with the amount of data being generated, no one really has the infrastructure to compete. Hope they do it before the regulators make them. If Apple has succeeded at building a market place around their closed platform Google can too.
- rgrieselhuber 13y ago
- dude_abides 13y agoDouglas Hofstadter once said of Ray Kurzweil and his grand ideas: "It's an intimate mixture of rubbish and good ideas, and it's very hard to disentangle the two, because these are smart people; they're not stupid." I think Google (and Larry Page) is betting that they will be able to separate out this mixture.
- ot 13y agoThe irony is that you could say the exact same thing about Douglas Hofstadter himself.
- Lost_BiomedE 13y agoHe may have noticed this in himself first, then applied it to others. In fact, he may consider it a limitation of genius and part of the current human condition.
- samstave 13y agoThis is an interesting point. One thing about good ideas - is not so much the novelty, but more-so ideas that are far enough out there that they are semi-novel, but based on an extrapolation of the current state of things such that a path to getting the idea implementable is possible. Sometimes, this means that you're able to foresee the trajectory of industries and technology that others miss or can't. However - its also important to have the resources avaialble to be able to implement/execute/foster that which is needed to make those ideas become reality. In this case, he has immense resources which can make the ratio between rubbish and great ideas shift significantly. Its easy to simply be a daydreamer - even if a greatly informed day dreamer - when you have no resources.
- Kekeli 13y agoI am going to insert this piece into my pitch. It touches on the basic and salient rationale that access to resources is a given to derive inertia for for certain ideas
- 13y ago
- goloxc 13y agowhile Wolfram said that the bottom-up approach is the new kind of science
- taliesinb 13y agoWolfram and Kurzweil are betting on opposite horses here. I work for Wolfram, but I'd be delighted if the ML-approach works. Personally, I think we need a diversity of approaches to really understand how to crack the nut of 'hard AI' (if that is even a sensible thing to pursue).
- losethos 13y agoGod says... 12:43 And the LORD said unto Moses and Aaron, This is the ordinance of the passover: There shall no stranger eat thereof: 12:44 But every man's servant that is bought for money, when thou hast circumcised him, then shall he eat thereof. 12:45 A foreigner and an hired servant shall not eat thereof. 12:46 In one house shall it be eaten; thou shalt not carry forth ought of the flesh abroad out of the house; neither shall ye break a bone thereof. 12:47 All the congregation of Israel shall keep it. 12:48 And when a stranger shall sojourn with thee, and will keep the passover to the LORD, let all his males be circumcised, and then let him come near and keep it; and he shall be as one that is born in the land: for no uncircumcised person shall eat thereof. 12:49 One law shall be to him that is homeborn, and unto the stranger that sojourneth among you. ---- God says... applicable abroad persistence rapture distilled unlike wiser take_the_day_off Abraham heretics throng hoar Orestes engage glorying resend honesty Creusa's stilled sweeten ----- God's upset cause I din do a more formal offering. I'm special :-)
- sixQuarks 13y agoIs it just me, or does Ray Kurzweil seem to be getting younger? I remember seeing a speech of his a few years ago, he had a nervous tick where he was blinking his eyes constantly. He also looked a lot older. Now, he doesn't have that tick, seems to have more hair, etc. I know he takes like 100 pills every day
- coldtea 13y agoPeople can look older and younger at different times, depending on weight gain or loss, stress or depression, choice of clothing, plastic surgery (duh!), more or less workout, etc. Him getting 100 pills every day: I don't think is very relevant. Mostly delusional. If that worked, pharmaceutical companies would have made it into one mega-pill, and sold it for a fortune to rich people years ago.
- eavc 13y agoSomething as simple as lighting could also play into it depending on what opportunities you have for seeing someone at different times. As for your argument against 100 pills, that only holds if it's well-known or well-established that it works and works safely.
- coldtea 13y ago>As for your argument against 100 pills, that only holds if it's well-known or well-established that it works and works safely. Or semi-safely. The rich are also "early adopters". Also see tragically failed plastic surgeries and BS like cryogenics. But still, that it's not "well-established that it works and works safely", is exactly my point about his use of the pills. Mostly wishful-thinking on his part.
- fyi80 13y agoWell, if a drug has a dose in the ~200mg range, you can't physically fit many of them into one pill.
- raldi 13y agoThe photo in the article is from Wikipedia, where the date is listed as "before 2005".
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- kashrr 13y agoKurzweil has grand ideas, thinks out of the box enough for people to call him crazy. I would guess some of those are the kind of grand / crazy ideas larry and company want to pursue too. So i think it is a good fit. For more information on the man and what motivates him. See the documentary the Transcendent Man, http://www.amazon.com/Transcendent-Man/dp/B0051Y6NQA http://www.amazon.com/Transcendent-Man/dp/B0051Y6NQA
- coldtea 13y ago>How Ray Kurzweil Plans To Revolutionize Search At Google By rigorous hand-waving, as he mostly does things the last 1-2 decades?
- harshreality 13y agoI attended a talk he gave on campus when I was in college, and afterward I lurked as some really smart people (grad students, maybe one or two profs) asked him for details. He came across as a con artist, selling ideas that he can't defend. For instance, one that stuck out was that he had nothing to back up his assertion that within x years there would be the ability to non-destructively copy all the information in a brain. Several questions I thought were fairly reasonable were met with the response: "read my book[s]." (in context, as I recall he was promoting _The Age of Spiritual Machines_.) His basic argument of the inevitable advance of technology to true AI, or ability to upload consciousness or integrate computers with brains, rests on priors that are not clearly relevant. With his latest title, "How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed", how can anyone take him seriously? Scientists (practicing scientists) have been writing books like that for decades, and the lesson should be that unless you've demonstrated that you can build an AI (real AI, not soft AI like machine learning), you have no business using a title like that. If real AI is simply a combination of the right machine learning tricks, then the trick is in the combination, because nobody has figured it out (publicly) yet.
- testbro 13y agoKurzweil is awkwardly reminiscent of the connectionists of yore. I'm surprised nobody's taken a similarly hostile attitude towards his (as yet unsubstantiable) predictions.
- taliesinb 13y agoI've been to a couple Kurzweil talks. He's got a good shtick, but it doesn't seem to change much. I tweeted "I saw this talk 10 years ago. Shouldn't it be 5 minutes long and 100x more interesting now?"
- J_ 13y ago
- obviouslygreen 13y agoCall me paranoid, but this has to be the mashup best suited to produce Skynet.
- pavedwalden 13y agoYes, but they'll need Boston Dynamics in the mix before they can build terminators.
- ippisl 13y agoI wonder what would be the best strategy for google to monetize such an asset as ibm watson? Surely ads based model is not the best way(since they've already got a large part of the internet ad market and given that only google, ibm and maybe microsoft could build something similar. If it's a truly competitive advantage, wouldn't offering it for startups/other-businesses in return for equity would offer bigger profits?
- alok-g 13y agoMy best understanding is that Watson would be too costly as compared to Google.
- ippisl 13y agoThey say now it's "a pizza-box-sized server".
- alok-g 13y agoThanks. I could find some references using those keywords! Do you then also know about the cost per query as compared to a Google search? Or alternatively, how much concurrent traffic can they handle with that server?
- ippisl 13y agoI don't know, but i don't think that really matters. google mostly deals the "cheap" stuff, while watson deals with really valuable stuff , so compute cost is is not so important. I think there was a query on quora about this.
- fyi80 13y agoWatson-ish system is IBM's medical diagnostics system. and Google Search is basically Watson.
- ippisl 13y ago
- michaelochurch 13y agoEvery time I read about machine learning work that is being done at Google, that's available if you're a Real Googler, and then compare that to the closed-allocation nightmare the other 90% face, it makes me want to fucking rage out and fly a plane into Mountain View... ... land, get off that plane, take a cab, and have a polite but blunt conversation with the founders about how to fix their company. (What did you think I meant?) Artificial intelligence is nice, brahs, but natural stupidity in the form of closed allocation and Enron-style performance reviews are putting that company at 10% speed. Clear out the latter and you'll have plenty more muscle for the former. I'm sure Ray Kurzweil will do amazing things, but he'd do even more amazing things if the company still had the machinery (e.g. open allocation, a culture of human decency) to bring talent to him properly. The whole reason he is there is to work with great people that the company is supposed to be better equipped to find than he is... but how will that work, given that the company sold off its ability to reward and recognize talent just to appease McKinsey?
- yuhong 13y ago>... land, get off that plane, take a cab, and have a polite but blunt conversation with the founders about how to fix their company. I wonder how easy would it be to actually do so?
- nostrademons 13y agoI'm a little curious - have you done machine learning work that's made it into a real product? I tried doing it a bit with my last project. My results were basically terrible. It turns out that getting useful results out of heterogenous, vague, fuzzily-specified real world data is really hard. I'm tight with a few folks in Search Quality whose job is that sort of data-scientist machine-learning work, and they're really good at it. Y'know what 90% of their daily time is spent on? Compiling golden sets. Labeling training data. Running MapReduces to collect basic statistics about their data set. Running MapReduces to identify representative members of their data set, and outliers that should be excluded. Shoving data into R to visualize it. Futzing with numeric coefficients. Building webpages and tools so they can visualize the data and results, futz with the numbers online, and get feedback in real time. Collecting test sets and running your algorithm against them, and then trying to figure out why your losses are losing. Machine-learning from a practitioner's POV is not at all like the textbooks and theoretical papers suggest. I'd estimate that less than 10% of one's time goes into the "fun" part of machine learning - brainstorming new signals and writing the code to extract them and feed them into your classifier - and 90% is on the kind of grunt work that hard science grad students do all the time. You get paid well for it, but that's because a lot of the work is really boring and time-consuming. I suspect that I get a far more frequent rush of accomplishment as a mostly-UI guy than the data scientists in my department get. It's a tool. It works well in some cases, but it can take a lot of effort to get it to work well.
- jpalomaki 13y agoI think Google Books project provides an interesting twist on this. Now their AI not only has the whole content of the publicly accessible Internet to study but also quite nice chunk of material ever put on paper.