It was one of the most tedious jobs on the internet. A team of Googlers would spend day after day staring at computer screens, scrutinizing tiny snippets of street photographs, asking themselves the same question over and over again: “Am I looking at an address or not?’ Click. Yes. Click. Yes. Click. No.
This was a critical part of building the company’s Google Maps service. Knowing the precise address of a building is really helpful information for mapmakers. But that didn’t make life any easier for those poor Googlers who had to figure out whether a string of numbers captured by Google’s roving Street View cars was a phone number, a graffiti tag, or a legitimate address.
Then, a few months ago, they were relieved of their agony, after some Google engineers trained the company’s machines to handle this thankless task. Traditionally, computers have muffed this advanced kind of image recognition, and Google finally cracked the problem with its new artificial intelligence system, known as Google Brain. With Brain, Google can now transcribe all of the addresses that Street View has captured in France in less than an hour.
“GOOGLE IS NOT REALLY A SEARCH COMPANY. IT’S A MACHINE-LEARNING COMPANY.”
Since its birth in the company’s secretive X Labs three years ago, the Google Brain has flourished inside the company, giving its army of software engineers a way to apply cutting-edge machine-learning algorithms to a growing array of problems. And in many ways, it seems likely to give Google an edge as it expands into new territory over the next decade, much in the way that its search algorithms and data center expertise helped build its massively successful advertising business during the last ten years.
“Google is not really a search company. It’s a machine-learning company,” says Matthew Zeiler, the CEO of visual search startup Clarifai, who worked on Google Brain during a pair of internships. He says that all of Google’s most-important projects—autonomous cars, advertising, Google Maps—stand to gain from this type of research. “Everything in the company is really driven by machine learning.”
In addition to the Google Maps work, there’s Android’s voice recognition software and Google+’s image search. But that’s just the beginning, according to Jeff Dean, one of primary thinkers behind the Brain project. He believes the Brain will help with the company’s search algorithms and boost Google Translate. “We now have probably 30 or 40 different teams at Google using our infrastructure,” says Dean. “Some in production ways, some are exploring it and comparing it to their existing systems, and generally getting pretty good results for a pretty broad set of problems.”
The project is part of a much larger shift towards a new form of artificial intelligence called “deep learning.” Facebook is exploring similar work, and so is Microsoft, IBM, and others. But it seems that Google has pushed this technology further—at least for the moment.