Google's Jeff Dean on How Artificial Intelligence will Affect Your Life

Artificial Intelligence

In a recent TEDx Talk, Google's Jeff Dean discussed why and how these advances have come about, what the implications are for areas as diverse as robotics, healthcare, human creativity and computer hardware design, and why these possibilities are so exciting.

In the last five years, significant advances were made in the fields of computer vision, speech recognition, and language understanding. In a recent TEDx Talk, Google's Jeff Dean discussed why and how these advances have come about, what the implications are for areas as diverse as robotics, healthcare, human creativity and computer hardware design, and why these possibilities are so exciting.

Part of the reason Dean shows why artificial intelligence has really accelerated development in the last few years is the advent of deep learning, and algorithmic tools like TensorFlow along with the exponential leaps in computational power. As he states, machine learning follows the same practice we use for learning: using examples and practicing. "We can build the software framework that enables us to express all these different learning problems, and then use it over and over for our research, and for our products," Dean says. TensorFlow, now open sourced has lead to some very interesting results.

In one example, a Japanese farmer used TensorFlow to help sort his cucumbers. The image processing technologies that neural networks have allowed have in recent months pushed computer vision past that of humans. To put that in perspective, only five years ago, computer vision was still very far behind human perception, frequently yielding erroneous results. Now we are behind, with no way to catch up.

"That's a really powerful and transformative thing," states Dean.

Dean shows how Google is now using deep learning technology to help teach robots how to pick up objects. This processing is done from the pixel input of video cameras.

Healthcare is another area Dean assesses will be impacted by artificial intelligence. He cites an example where a deep learning system is already out-diagnosing ophthalmologists in cased of diabetic retinopathy.

Dean also shows how art has already begun to be impacted by deep learning. Already anyone can access tools that allow photographs to be rendered in the style of a painting, or any other image.

Deep learning is also transforming how we design and build computers, says Dean. For instance, Google's Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), has been designed to process neural net computations. As Google hardware engineer Norm Jouppi describes TPU, "It only fires up the bits that you need, when you need them. This allows more operations per second, with the same amount of silicon."

What does the use of neural nets mean for our future? According to Dean, questions like, "Describe this video in Spanish," or "Find me documents related to reinforcement learning for robotics and summarize them in German," will begin to be solvable queries. Also a task for a robot like "Go get me a glass of milk from the kitchen," becomes much more solvable.

"AI will help us be healthier, happier, more productive and creative."

Closing the talk, Dean states that "AI will help us be healthier, happier, more productive and creative."

Dean is a Senior Fellow in Google’s Research Group, where he leads the Google Brain project. His areas of interest include large-scale distributed systems, performance monitoring, compression techniques, information retrieval, application of machine learning to search and other related problems, microprocessor architecture, compiler optimizations, and development of new products that organize existing information in new and interesting ways.