Towards AGI … and the continued dominance of Google …

Towards AGI … and the continued dominance of Google? …

At our core, we stand on the success of our local businesses. We do not stand on the profits that Google will make, we stand on the jobs provided by those in our communities. A healthy society is full of people who create new businesses. Some will fail, but others will thrive. The last thing we need is for companies to develop monopolies and which undercut our small businesses. And so innovation is often at the core of helping a small business thrive against its much larger competitor. But if a large company just underbids, and make loses on it, it is not a fair playing field.

One of the greatest worries is when a large company cross-subsidies from a profitable area into a loss-making area, in order for them to gain another foothold and squeeze out the competition. Increasingly we see this, and where the large Cloud service companies such as Google and Facebook are increasingly taking over market segments and dominating them.

Google, themselves, actually have a bit of a track record in trying out different areas to see if there is a business model, and then leaving them (and thus leaving many with the problem in how to move away from their service). And so Google has Internet Searches, Chrome, Android OS, YouTube, DoubleClick, Google Pixel, Google Maps, Google News, Google Images, Google Scholar, Google Flights, and so many other things. If Google wants a market, they have the power to take it over. The parent to all this is Google activity is a company with the generic name of Alphabet.

And so the AI market is one that many of the large companies wanting to dominate in. IBM has had a rocky road with Deep Blue and Watson, but it is DeepMind — a subsidiary of Alphabet — that really wants to become the machine of choice. But it is not working out as planned with a loss of £470.2m ($571m) and debts of around £1bn (of which Google will guarantee). This might not seem a lot for a company of Alphabet’s size, but it has an effect on all the companies who are bidding for work against the might of Google. At present, DeepMind — based in London — has a revenue stream of only £102.8m. But the cost of recruiting top AI people creates a significant problem for DeepMind … and where an academic can earn over 10 times their normal salary. While the core spin is often on things like health care, at the core of DeepMind are key markets for Google: ads, shopping, and sales. But success in these areas will most likely scale into other business sectors.

At the core of this work is artificial general intelligence (AGI), and where machines could show the core signs of human intelligence:

“The capacity for learning, reasoning, understanding, and similar forms of mental activity; aptitude in grasping truths, relationships, facts, meanings, etc.” (Legg et al, 2007)

There are other competitors in the space, such as OpenAI (which received funding for $1b from Microsoft), and IBM Deep Blue/Watson. The major challenge will be to find enough talent to support these developments while sustaining major losses.

It may seem like science-fiction, but a worry for us all, is that Google becomes the most advanced brain ever produced and takes over the world! Tee-hee!

If you are interested, we have a book coming out in Cyber Intelligence, and where we aim to explore the rise of the machine.