Commercial? Yes | ||
Type of project Artificial intelligence and machine learning Location Mountain View, California | ||
Google Brain is a deep learning research project at Google.
Contents
History
The so-called "Google Brain" project began in 2011 as a part-time research collaboration between Google Fellow Jeff Dean, Google Researcher Greg Corrado, and Stanford University professor Andrew Ng. Ng had been interested in using deep learning techniques to crack the problem of artificial intelligence since 2006, and in 2011 began collaborating with Dean and Corrado to build a large-scale deep learning software system, DistBelief, on top of Google's cloud computing infrastructure. Google Brain started as a Google X project and became so successful that it was graduated back to Google: Astro Teller has said that Google Brain paid for the entire cost of Google X.
In June 2012, the New York Times reported that a cluster of 16,000 computers dedicated to mimicking some aspects of human brain activity had successfully trained itself to recognize a cat based on 10 million digital images taken from YouTube videos. The story was also covered by National Public Radio and SmartPlanet.
In March 2013, Google hired Geoffrey Hinton, a leading researcher in the deep learning field, and acquired the company DNNResearch Inc. headed by Hinton. Hinton said that he would be dividing his future time between his university research and his work at Google.
On 26 January 2014, multiple news outlets stated that Google had purchased DeepMind Technologies for an undisclosed amount. Analysts later announced that the company was purchased for £400 million ($650M USD / €486M), although later reports estimated the acquisition was valued at over £500 million. The acquisition reportedly took place after Facebook ended negotiations with DeepMind Technologies in 2013, which resulted in no agreement or purchase of the company.
In Google products
The project's technology is currently used in the Android Operating System's speech recognition system, photo search for Google+ and video recommendations in YouTube.
Team
Google Brain was initially established by Google Fellow Jeff Dean and visiting Stanford professor Andrew Ng (Ng since moved to lead the artificial intelligence group at Baidu). As of 2014, team members included Jeff Dean, Geoffrey Hinton, Greg Corrado, Quoc Le, Ilya Sutskever, Alex Krizhevsky, Samy Bengio, and Vincent Vanhoucke.
Reception
Google Brain has received in-depth coverage in Wired Magazine, the New York Times, Technology Review, National Public Radio, and Big Think.