Two years ago Stanford professor Andrew Ng joined Google’s X Lab, the research group that’s given us Google Glass and the company’s driverless cars. His mission: to harness Google’s massive data centers and build artificial intelligence systems on an unprecedented scale.
He ended up working with one of Google’s top engineers to build the world’s largest neural network; A kind of computer brain that can learn about reality in much the same way that the human brain learns new things. Ng’s brain watched YouTube videos for a week and taught itself which ones were about cats. It did this by breaking down the videos into a billion different parameters and then teaching itself how all the pieces fit together.
