Google Lets Its A.I. Out To Play

In a bold move, Google announced it will open source its cutting edge deep learning artificial intelligence called TensorFlow to the public for free. “What we’re hoping is that the community adopts this as a good way of expressing machine learning algorithms of lots of different types, and also contributes to building and improving [TensorFlow] in lots of different and interesting ways,” said Jeff Dean speaking on behalf of Google.

Google has been very busy since restructuring to Alphabet. Just last week it was announced they were unleashing their artificial intelligence in the form of a program that will read and reply to emails on a user's behalf titled 'Smart Reply." A lot of folks scratched their heads at the naming of the parent company to Alphabet until they realized it was wordplay for an alpha bet on artificial intelligence.

The way we see it here at Futureslaver HQ is that Google's artificial intelligence must be nearing the finish line toward artificial general intelligence (the next stage of A.I.) and they wouldn't mind speeding up the process. An artificial general intelligence is one that will outmatch a human at anything. The next stage beyond general intelligence is referred to as super-intelligence and you probably don't need an explanation for that. Just think of something along the lines of Ultron.

In a business sense with an open source platform there is not so much that stands to be gained by being the person or company responsible for furthering along artificial intelligence as much as having the resources capable of harnessing its ability and applying it to current or new technologies. The big tech corporations already have the resources, so for them it's just a matter of getting to a stronger artificial intelligence and as fast as possible. Perhaps other tech companies would not have chose to go the open source route; however, Google seems confident they will succeed first in implementing any improvements to their A.I. - especially considering it's their A.I. (just like having home court advantage). It should also be noted that Google isn't releasing the entire framework of their deep learning A.I., which would serve as another advantage - potentially holding the key to the final piece of the puzzle.

Artificial intelligence experts often speculate that achieving artificial general intelligence via an open source platform is the likeliest way it will happen - e.g., the hobbyist computer scientist (one upon thousands) in his basement pounding energy drinks and working for hours and hours on end has the ultimate Eureka moment and the rest is history. Read more details -- here --.