Not long ago I watched the 2013 movie "Google and the world Brain"
One the things that stood out for me was the claim that Google only has 1 goal. And this goal was already there when they started there search engine in 1998. And that is not to make money or a great search engine. It is to create a true AI.
To create an AI you need to fill it with as much input as possible. Human input. From searches, your phone or books.
The docu is about books and how Google kinda stole it and used it. See the trailer further below.
But besides this trailer I would like to point to this article in the New York Times from this december.
The Great A.I. Awakening
Prologue: You Are What You Have Read
Late one Friday night in early November, Jun Rekimoto, a distinguished professor of human-computer interaction at the University of Tokyo, was online preparing for a lecture when he began to notice some peculiar posts rolling in on social media. Apparently Google Translate, the company’s popular machine-translation service, had suddenly and almost immeasurably improved. Rekimoto visited Translate himself and began to experiment with it. He was astonished. He had to go to sleep, but Translate refused to relax its grip on his imagination.
Rekimoto wrote up his initial findings in a blog post.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/magazine/the-great-ai-awakening.html?_r=0
It seems a giant leap is being made in AI. Something to be watched with care. It can bring much to humanity, but it is not free, but owned.
The trailer
