Search Engine vs. Artificial Intelligence - The engine manually searches for smart devices

Author: Xin Haiguang Micro World (share my views and knowledge here...... Click on the name under the title to follow) Perhaps what Page, Brin and Robin Li value more is the almost limitless imagination that AI can expand for companies. If a search engine company makes a breakthrough in artificial intelligence, it will undoubtedly be an epoch-making killer invention in the future. It is not an exaggeration to say that "whoever gets artificial intelligence will win the world".

Perhaps what Page, Brin, and Robin Li value more is the almost limitless imagination that AI can expand for companies. For an average search engine company, the imagination is nothing more than developing better systems and selling more ads, but for an innovation-driven company that may be the first to make a breakthrough in the field of artificial intelligence, the future possibilities are simply innumerable. Perhaps, the world's first trillion-dollar company was born in this field.

Will the gap between machines and humans be bridged in the near future?

At the end of last month, Negroponte, the "king of prophets" of the digital age, came to China to discuss the future of human science and technology with Chinese science and technology columnists. The arrival of "Micro World" can be described as timely. One of the important aspects of this exchange, called "The Great Dialogue", is precisely the above question.

The gap between machines and humans is actually divided into two aspects, one is the imitation of human limbs by machines, that is, biomimicry. For now, there seems to be no key controversy in this area, and while there is still a long way to go for machines to come to life mimicking the human body, there is no chasm that cannot be bridged. In the laboratory, for example, scientists have been able to design prostheses that continuously sense the position of joints and adapt to the load of the limb to coordinate movements. Take the world's first ankle-foot prosthetic robotic system, for example, which utilizes multiple sensors, microcontrollers, and analog devices to mimic human musculoskeletal structure and movement, providing a natural gait for calf amputees for the first time. Today, this bionic prosthesis can give patients a realistic sense of touch, and they can still feel the sand under their feet when walking on the beach. Twenty years ago, no one dared to imagine the emergence of such a technology.

But on the other hand, there is a lot of controversy in the field of robots mimicking the human brain, that is, artificial intelligence. Some scientists believe that this is just around the corner, while others believe that the intelligence gap between machines and humans will never be bridged.

On February 18, 2011, the supercomputer Watson defeated humans and stood on the top podium of the intellectual contest with humans. The famous futurist Kurzweil believes that because information technology is moving towards the singularity of "superhuman intelligence", when this information singularity arrives in 2045, artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence.

However, there are also many scientists who believe that machine intelligence surpasses human intelligence is just a scientific fantasy, including Rob Miller, a professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Yann LeCun, director of Facebook's artificial intelligence lab and a deep learning expert, all believe that machine algorithms do surpass human capabilities in some areas. But some areas, such as socio-cultural cognition, include constantly inventing new words, disseminating and liking kitten videos, or participating in the construction of other cultural phenomena, which are difficult for machine algorithms to reach.

In 1950, Turing published an essay entitled Can Machines Think? The concept of "machine thinking" was proposed for the first time. The hypothesis is that a person asks a computer a series of questions in a special way without touching it. If a person cannot tell whether a computer is a human or a computer based on a problem for a long time, then it can be considered that the computer has the same intelligence as a human, that is, the computer can think. This is known as the "Turing test".

At the time of the Turing Test, mankind had not yet invented the Internet. Scientists have a very simple path for testing the intelligence of machines, relying heavily on the subjective judgment of judges and test subjects, and can only judge whether the machine has human intelligence, but cannot quantitatively analyze the gap between machine and human intelligence and the speed of change.

But after the advent of the Internet, search engines will conduct billions of "Turing tests" every day, and every search is a dialogue between humans and machines, and it is a question that humans ask machines. Search engines have also become smarter and smarter through the accumulation of big data and have become representatives of machine intelligence.

Linking search engines to artificial intelligence has never been proposed in previous science fictions. When the search engine was first invented, there was no such expectation for it, and the search engine was just a search program on the Internet. However, with the progress of computer and Internet technology, cloud computing technology, big data technology, etc., scientists have found that search engines can have a certain IQ through continuous learning, and the IQ is getting higher and higher.

In May of this year, the Internet X Lab tested 50 search engines and three groups of humans of different ages around the world using the machine and human universal IQ test question bank, and the results are as follows:

Through the test, it was found that the knowledge mastery ability of the best search engines such as Google and Baidu is close to the level of 3-year-old children.

This is only the result of the synthesis, due to the extremely poor performance in high-level intelligence factors such as guessing and prediction, permutation and combination, pattern discovery, innovation and creation, camouflage and deception, the average IQ of the machine is greatly reduced. In terms of common sense knowledge such as astronomy, geography, history, mathematical calculations, and language translation, machines or the Internet have far exceeded the capabilities of ordinary humans, and are even terrifyingly powerful.

From a business point of view, the sudden emergence of artificial intelligence search engines has found a new breakthrough point for Google and Baidu. They were originally just Internet companies, but the rapid development of Internet technology and the accumulation of databases have provided an environment and opportunities for breakthroughs in artificial intelligence. Through the path of artificial intelligence, they have become high-tech companies with the imagination of future technologies. As a result, Google has listed artificial intelligence as a key direction for the company's future development. Earlier this year, the acquisition of Deep Mind, a British artificial intelligence company, brought Google back to the headlines of major newspapers. Deep Mind's founders include former chess prodigy and neuroscientist Demis Hassabis.

Google's ultimate goal is to develop truly artificial intelligence products, such as machines that can learn and think on their own. As Google co-founder Brinsel said, "Computer scientists have spent decades making this dream a reality, but never really launched a machine like this." However, there is reason to believe that one day in the future, we will be able to develop machines that can think logically, and can do better than humans. ”

Among Chinese companies, Baidu is the closest to Google, and it is also pinning its future on artificial intelligence. Robin Li proposed the ambitious Baidu Brain plan and recruited Ng Enda, one of the world's top three artificial intelligence experts, from overseas. One of Ng's famous deep learning experiments was to ask a machine to recognize the "cat": build a network of 16,000 computers and show the network 10 million randomly selected videos. After a period of "learning", the network identified what kind of animal the "cat" was without external interference, and successfully found the photo of the cat, with a recognition rate of 81.7%.

If search engine companies make a breakthrough in artificial intelligence, it will undoubtedly be a groundbreaking killer invention in the future, and it is not an exaggeration to say that "whoever gets artificial intelligence will win the world". However, in the short term, search engine companies also have huge hidden business interests in AI research. Even if it doesn't cross the watershed, advances in AI in areas such as big data and deep learning can improve the user experience of products such as search, maps, and group buying. What's more, Google, Baidu, etc. are also promoting their own smart hardware platform plans.

Perhaps what Page, Brin, and Robin Li value more is the almost infinite imagination space that artificial intelligence opens up for companies. For an average search engine company, the imagination is nothing more than developing better systems and selling more ads, but for an innovation-driven company that may be the first to make a breakthrough in artificial intelligence, the possibilities for the future are simply innumerable. In the stock market, it would not be surprising if there were hedge funds lurking in search engine companies in the future because of the concept of "artificial intelligence". Perhaps, the world's first trillion-dollar market value company was born in this field.

This article cites parts of the Internet X Lab report.