
Google.ai - rbanffy
https://google.ai
======
RKearney
.ai is not one of the ccTLDs that Google considers generic[0].

It would be interesting to know if Google will be making .ai generic, or if
they will make a special exception for themselves considering they do not
allow others to change the geographical targeting of domains registered to a
ccTLD.

[0]:
[https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399?hl=en&ref...](https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399?hl=en&ref_topic=6002454)

~~~
laser
Have they made a special exception for themselves? They don't even appear to
be indexed yet?
[https://www.google.com/search?q=google+ai&oq=google+ai&aqs=c...](https://www.google.com/search?q=google+ai&oq=google+ai&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.988j0j1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#q=google.ai)

~~~
kasparsklavins
You can find it with a direct search.. it comes in second.
[https://www.google.com/search?q=site:google.ai](https://www.google.com/search?q=site:google.ai)

~~~
xd1936
2nd out of 2 results. That's pretty funny.

~~~
awqrre
the first result is an ad (not sure why my ad blocker decided to let it
through)

~~~
redtuesday
If it's adblock plus they let ads through for which they receive money.

~~~
awqrre
it's uBlock Origin and they aren't supposed to do this as far as I know...
hopefully their filter is just outdated.

~~~
csomar
holy cow, that ad looks _exactly_ like a normal result with a very low
contrast small link on the upper-right.

~~~
awqrre
I wonder if you could buy an ad that looks like that from Google or if only
Google is allowed to use them...

~~~
weaksauce
It says google promoted so I doubt it. the ones that are ads say Ad in a
little box near where you click.

------
davidmr
The potential use of TPUs for training is very exciting. They say that they
train floating point, but I don't see any indication to the FP precision
they're capable of; perhaps I'm missing it. At any rate, I'm really excited to
see resources being piled into their Cloud ML Engine product at this high
rate.

I've made this comment in a couple of other threads, which subsequently veered
off into other territory, so forgive the repetition, but it's a really
interesting topic to me. The open-source distributed tensorflow stuff is
pretty nice, but it still requires a huge amount of hand coding and tuning the
machinery, reminding me quite a lot of just rolling the damn thing in MPI
yourself. I'm very excited to see where distributed tf will be in a year or
two, but it's a chore today.

Depending on how much these TPUs and other Cloud ML Engine developments help,
I'd gladly abandon the attempt to roll it myself with the distributed tf.

The hope is that using Google's secret sauce to auto-distribute the execution
graphs and associated data ingestion makes things "just work". At the moment,
the documentation and examples for that are a bit all over the place and
require writing models to conform to the newish tf.contrib.learn.Experiment
API, which is also a bit underdocumented and underexampled. Using it for very
large datasets (say >tens of TB) seems to be pretty challenging at this moment
(to me at least). For a lot of use cases, BigTable seems to be the ideal
ingestion engine for Cloud ML tf jobs, but there's no C native API. You can
use BigTable, but you can only dump complete tables into tensorflow rather
than querying for relevant data (since the queries cost money, a 5000-core
jobs with just a few queries per core would cost you a fortune, so the ability
to query BigTable in the tensorflow reader is disabled.

At any rate, I've been banging around on it for a few weeks and am really
hopeful. I will follow Cloud ML Engine's career with considerable interest.

~~~
deepnotderp
Guaranteed to be fp16.

~~~
arcanus
Or even lower, companies are experimenting with ternary, fp8, etc. for
inference tasks.

~~~
deepnotderp
This is explicitly for training, their first generation was for inference and
used INT8 math.

------
jwtadvice
I'm not comfortable with Google having and sharing my data.

Very excited about the NVidia chips though. Would be happy to run TensorFlow
with them on my own hardware - though I'm more excited about the day when
client software and hardware make that easy and cheap.

~~~
cheath
I share a similar discomfort. However, between Gmail and Google search, they
already have all of my data.

~~~
eicnix
You could pay for Google apps for work and don't have your data indexed. So
it's really more a question how much money / work to switch to another
provider is your data worth to you?

~~~
wfunction
What exactly is so scary about indexing and so comforting about the lack
thereof that makes all the difference to you and everyone else? The index is
derived from the data... if you have the data you're minutes away from the
index. And an index isn't even necessary to search data. Why are people okay
with giving away their data as long as it's not indexed?

~~~
halflings
Minutes away, if Google would illegally access your data in violation with
their terms of service, which does not make sense.

~~~
wfunction
Is violating a contract a crime?

And what's the _privacy_ issue with indexing, and heck, still showing ads? As
long as they're not sharing your data, where is your privacy being violated by
_indexing_ and _being shown ads_ when they already have the same data? That
makes no sense.

~~~
pikzen
Violating a contract is a breach of the civil code in my country, exposing you
to financial compensation. It is very similar in the rest of the EU. So while
not a crime, thankfully some countries still take that seriously.

The issue is "fuck you, I am paying you to use your service without having you
getting your greedy paws on my data." If they start indexing data from actual
customers, then they're reading it. That's a breach of privacy and contract,
plain and simple. And at that point, well, you might as well not pay for their
service if it doesn't bring you anything more than a free tier plan.

If I'm paying you to keep my private journal safe yet accessible, you bet I'm
going to be pissed if you start telling me at which page something is. Maybe
you just remembered a content -> page mapping, but you still read my damn
private journal.

~~~
wfunction
I was bringing up the contract issue somewhat separately to point out that
it's not a criminal issue like the parent claimed, as far as I know. I wasn't
saying breaching your contract is OK, sorry if that was confusing.

My main beef is with what we do and don't call a privacy violation. If your
issue was that use of your information or identity by someone else (especially
to make money) entitled your to fair compensation (or otherwise it shouldn't
be done simply because of unfairness), I would agree with you. If your claim
was that a PERSON (or their machine) obtaining any new information about you
is a privacy violation, I would get that too. But you're claiming a _machine_
that can violate your _privacy_ merely by indexing and displaying things back
to YOURSELF that it already knew. That makes no sense to me. No one is gaining
any extra information about you when a computer indexes information it already
has, so while it might be unfair, it simply cannot be a privacy violation.

------
khazhoux
Pet peeve: the Google AI effort is the product of ${LARGE_NUMBER} of
engineers. This marketing page highlights a half-dozen luminaries. Not only do
these luminaries also get comped ($$) one or more orders of magnitude more
than rank-and-file, but now they get the glory as well. Sigh.

~~~
enknamel
This is true in all endeavors. There will always be leaders who get the
majority of credit and grunts who do most of the actual work and don't get
any. See a cool building? The architect gets all the credit but the people who
actually built it get none.

~~~
eanzenberg
This is why I'm happy most of all the iterative improvement and breakthroughs
in ML are happening at research labs, public or private. When papers get
published, you usually know who contributed to the endeavor.

~~~
phil21
I'm curious how you would even know? If Google is making ML breakthroughs, I
think it's quite obvious they won't be immediately publishing them if they are
actually commercially useful.

~~~
kcanini
On the contrary, Google has a very large number of publications every year at
top AI conferences.

~~~
phil21
Right, but I'm saying once they actually hit commercially useful breakthroughs
(e.g. AI game changer/black swan) they certainly won't be sharing them any
longer.

Or put another way, they could currently be holding back 90% of their current
research and only releasing 10%.

I'm not saying that is the case, it's just I think private research into some
fields is much more opaque than folks (myself) realize. Relying on Google (or
any other private company) to publish findings is likely not a path for long-
term success.

------
tghw
Slightly off topic, but this may be one of the first cases of a reversible
domain.

[https://google.ai/](https://google.ai/) and
[https://ai.google/](https://ai.google/) both point to the same page.

~~~
JimWestergren
Yes but google.ai is the canonical version: <link rel="canonical"
href="[https://google.ai/">](https://google.ai/">)

~~~
Savageman
For some reasons, both homepages currently show as <link rel="canonical"
href="[http://localhost/">](http://localhost/">)

------
dankai
AutoML is a huge step to bring ML to the developers out there. Kudos for that!

~~~
eggie5
u talking about automl, the scikit extension?

~~~
dankai
I hope its a bit more than that!

They recently published very novel approaches:
[https://openreview.net/pdf?id=rkpACe1lx](https://openreview.net/pdf?id=rkpACe1lx)
[https://openreview.net/pdf?id=r1Ue8Hcxg](https://openreview.net/pdf?id=r1Ue8Hcxg)

------
headmelted
"Federated Learning enables mobile phones to collaboratively learn a shared
prediction model while keeping all the training data on device.."

Does anyone else find it odd that we're so far through the looking glass this
past year that Richard Hendricks' latest venture seems not only plausible but
a bit mundane by comparison?

~~~
logicallee
You're right, our fascination with machine learning surpasses any caricature.

~~~
fixermark
It's pretty fascinating though; it's one of the branches of AI that has
covered the most practical-application ground in recent years.

------
temp1245
Let's be honest, who the hell wakes up asking "What should I do today?". This
tech is just so awkward..

~~~
Xcelerate
Everyone in a society whose jobs have all been automated away. What would you
do with your time if you were free to do anything with it?

~~~
cookiecaper
In fantasy world, we'd all be renaissance men, making beautiful art, building
useful products, etc.

In the real world, 99% of us would be bored out of our minds with rapidly-
declining health, rapidly-declining self-esteem brought on by our unexpectedly
poor handling of time, and a continuing unfulfilled search for stimulation
that will mostly get filled by more mindless "entertainment" and
consumerism/shopping.

Our social lives would decay as there'd be no in-built workplace community,
and this is exacerbated by today's convention of small or totally childless
families. We'd lose respect for one another. Productivity would plummet as few
people would have any incentive to work cooperatively anymore (and if you
can't imperil someone's paycheck, they will usually not contribute; for all of
the open-source developers, how many are only in it because their paycheck
and/or job prospects are somehow tied to it, and even including that number,
how many more closed-source developers are there?). Volunteers don't take firm
direction well, and that kind of direction is necessary to keep a successful,
efficient enterprise running.

There are plenty of windows into this imaginary world without obligatory labor
today, and they do not make it look like a pleasant place.

------
BinaryIdiot
I was sorta hoping with the announcement of Google.ai that they would add the
.ai extension to Google Domains. Right now there are so few, and very
terrible, registers that handle .ai. Like 101domain.com who can only make
nameserver changes for you during their 9am to 5pm business hours on weekdays.

~~~
CydeWeys
.ai is a ccTLD that is run by, I believe, a single person in Anguilla. I do
not think it is run on a platform that supports EPP, the standard protocol
that is used by registries and registrars to handle automated purchasing of
domain names. Given that, it would not be possible to handle .ai domain names
on Google Domains. 101domain.com is likely doing a manual process for
registering .ai domain names that goes through
[https://whois.ai/](https://whois.ai/)

(Source: I am the eng lead of Google Registry, which run's Google's TLDs.)

~~~
fps
in the late 90's, I knew the guy that had somehow secured and was running the
.so ccTLD single-handedly. In the age of $70/year register.com bills, it
seemed insane that a single person could be responsible for an entire TLD. I'm
glad to hear that some things on the internet are still run by people.

~~~
CydeWeys
A large number of ccTLDs are still run by a single random person deep in the
bowels of an IT department at some university. I was just at an ICANN meeting
in Madrid last week and met some of them.

Also, we (Charleston Road Registry) are definitely not a small company, but we
run ~45 TLDs with a team of engineers much smaller than 45, so we have a ratio
of TLDs to engineers significantly higher than 1:1.

------
api
Implied here is the emergence of a new business model: developer powerful
custom hardware that you do _not_ sell, but only make available as a service
in the cloud. This way you get multiple layers of lock-in.

~~~
xiphias
I think the main reason to push TensorFlow as open source was to be able sell
the TPU cloud without a total lock-in.

~~~
api
I suspect it's the opposite. TensorFlow in source will never be as fast as the
TPU cloud with custom processors, so it won't be as suitable for serious high
volume production stuff. It's more like a hook into the TPU ecosystem.

~~~
aianus
If TensorFlow is open source then there's nothing stopping AMD, NVIDIA, Intel,
etc. from making chips that can integrate with TensorFlow. Other than the fact
that it's hard, of course.

------
teddyh
Now, what was that quote again? “ _We have only bits and pieces of
information. But what we know for certain is that at some point in the early
21st century, all of mankind was united in celebration. We marveled at our own
magnificance as we gave birth to AI._ ”

Google seems to be more and more appropriate for _The Matrix_ quotes:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9780632](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9780632)

~~~
derefr
This is because Google is really pushing the _image_ of being the "place AI is
happening." They're doing the same amount of ML stuff they've always been, but
it looks bigger because they're focused much of their marketing on it and
attempting to associate their work in people's minds with the kind of "AI"
that's just futurism for now.

I think the reason they're pushing so hard, actually, is that they're in a
dogfight with IBM (i.e. Watson) over who enterprises will call if some VP gets
the idea that they want to "solve problem X with AI."

~~~
lern_too_spel
The timeline is more they hired Hinton, got a bunch of neural network street
cred as a result, and then hired a bunch of Hinton's acolytes, and then
acquired Deepmind. From the outside, it seems Dean or some other higher up had
the foresight / luck to bet big on neural architecture research just as the
engineering started becoming practical.

------
theprop
If Google's AI is so great, why is it that Google search results seem to get
worse and worse every year?

So many searches I do are so "SEO'ed", I feel like it's 1999 again.

~~~
babuskov
In my experience, Google is getting better at finding more general information
and worse in finding specific information.

It also tries to "help" too much with fuzzy matching which starts to make it
useless if you are looking for less common thing. For example, if you search
for "nmake tabs vs spaces" it returns a bunch of results for GNU make and
flame wars about tabs vs spaces instead of nmake specific info regarding usage
of tabs or spaces in nmake makefiles.

~~~
sf_rob
Yes, they seem to be dropping keywords that overly restrict results which is
ironic since those keywords are oftentimes the most important due to their
specificity.

I find myself preemptively using quotes more and more with Google. I kind of
which their logic was segmented by user-type.

------
felipemnoa
Unfortunately this doesn't seem to be for me, even though I'm really
interested in AI and I'm currently working on an AI project (look at my
profile if you are interested). I wish I could run my own AI algorithm rather
than just using their own. It would probably be cheaper to just buy my own
Xeon computers. Training is really what takes most of the computer power.

~~~
ansible
We just bought a used Xeon HP workstation for a build server. It is 7 years
old. But a 24-core new workstation would be much more expensive. We're putting
in some SSDs to speed up build times, and it came with 24GB of RAM, which is
enough for our use cases. The price? $400 or so. It even came with a Quadro
5000 video card, though we weren't planning on GPU compute for this particular
box.

~~~
felipemnoa
>>The price? $400 or so

Wow. The price is quite good. Is there some website you bought this from? How
many cores?

>>But a 24-core new workstation would be much more expensive

Tell me about it. I've been checking the prices of a dual 24 core workstation
and it is around $7K.

~~~
ansible
It's also a 24-core, dual-socket (12-cores per socket). There's a couple left
on ebay:

[http://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-Z800-Workstation-2x-Xeon-x5670-2-...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-Z800-Workstation-2x-Xeon-x5670-2-93GHz-24GB-900GB-
HDD-15K-Quadro-5000-No-
OS-/381874764533?hash=item58e9827af5:g:saoAAOSw44BYJQoa)

The one downside of this box is that the power supply is totally proprietary
to HP. Well, the motherboard too. So if one of those craps out, you're done,
unless you can locate a spare cheaply.

It's also reeeeaaally heavy and draws a lot of power.

------
softbuilder
Slightly O/T: What is that insane heatsink sitting on? TPU? Is it that stacked
up because it's passive?

~~~
jacquesm
Typically those sit in the airstream that a bunch of fan cartridges pull
through the enclosure. So they run from the bottom of the case all the way to
the top otherwise the air would flow around them instead of through them.

~~~
softbuilder
That makes sense. Thank you for explaining.

------
IanCal
Is there any pricing data available?

~~~
h4pless
It's all available on their price list under Machine Learning.

[https://cloud.google.com/pricing/list](https://cloud.google.com/pricing/list)

~~~
IanCal
I can't find an entry for TPUs, only regular machines and GPUs. Perhaps I'm
looking in the wrong place?

------
obulpathi
NVidia announces they are building new generation TPU's and two days later
Google announces that they have them in Google Cloud. God Speed!

~~~
titusnicolae
they're not talking about the same TPU

~~~
obulpathi
The comment is a fun poke. Please don't take it literally! NVidia's new Volta
GPU has Tensor cores that I think are very similar to what was in first
generation TPU. I read the TPU papers and blogs published recently and I am
seriously impressed by TPUs!

~~~
highd
The Volta is 16-bit floating point, so closer to second-gen TPU. The first-gen
TPU was integer only and used for prediction, not training.

------
tejasmanohar
I feel like there have been a series of announcements about AI toolkits and
work in the last week. Is there some collaboration, is this a special week?

~~~
kcanini
Google I/O is this week.

------
vturner
"We're currently testing Federated Learning in Gboard on Android, the Google
Keyboard"

Thank-you for reminding me why I don't use Gboard and instead the BlackBerry
Priv's fine keyboard instead. The obsession of prediction in our culture is
absurd.

~~~
Klathmon
Why is prediction absurd?

Doing something myself is one thing, having it done for me is convenient,
having it done for me before I asked is even better (I do not mean in all
situations, only in some, and only for some things, etc...)

~~~
vturner
Its absurd in what you sacrifice (the data you're typing into your device) for
the pay-out: a few milliseconds saved.

~~~
tshadley
Federated learning leaves the data on the device, only communicating updates
to abstract models. See [https://research.googleblog.com/2017/04/federated-
learning-c...](https://research.googleblog.com/2017/04/federated-learning-
collaborative.html)

------
usaphp
I might be skeptical, but every single AI experiment or showcase I see either
online or on google experiments list is nothing that impressive. The whole AI
thing is so overhyped these days...

~~~
aatchb
You don't think AlphaGo or self driving cars are impressive?

~~~
moxious
Yes and no. I mean the demo is great, but can I actually have one? No? Well
then I can only be so impressed.

I know, they're coming soon, but I've been waiting for years and at some point
the enthusiasm wanes when it's been right around the corner for several years.

Hey, maybe they're trying to solve a problem that's harder than anyone
expected.

Anyways, I'll be impressed when I can have one.

~~~
killjoywashere
You can't have a nuclear bomb either. Are they unimpressive?

~~~
moxious
Not at all the same. They're way past demo and have proven effectiveness
repeatedly.

Comparing pre-alpha with fielded is no comparison. Nuclear weapons haven't
been going on and on about how great they'll eventually be.

------
CarMaker
Sorry but I'm new and I read the "approach to comments":
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html)

I'd love a place where I can grok and find only useful info. Comments like
this don't help.

> The worst thing to post or upvote is something that's intensely but
> shallowly interesting: gossip about famous people, funny or cute pictures or
> videos, partisan political articles, etc. If you let that sort of thing onto
> a news site, it will push aside the deeply interesting stuff, which tends to
> be quieter.

~~~
dang
It's true that the comment was a bit fluffy, but it's also the sort of
whimsical tangent that is in the spirit of this site, which is intellectual
curiosity.

Intellectual curiosity often takes up seemingly trivial details and plays with
them for no particular reason. Mostly nothing important comes of it, but
sometimes something really does. In any case it would be a big mistake to try
to push that kind of thing out of here—it's well within the scope of what HN
exists for.

We detached this subthread from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14361923](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14361923)
and marked it off-topic.

~~~
modeless
It would be one thing if that was the only fluffy comment. The entire
collection of top level comments is nothing but fluff, with only one or two
exceptions. The vast majority of comments on this page are completely off
topic. There is practically zero technical merit to any of the threads, even
the on topic ones.

I think it was unfortunate that this generic landing page was chosen as the
golden submission and other more specific and more technical submissions (such
as
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14360653](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14360653))
were duped off the front page. If a more specific article had been chosen
instead, we might have had a more focused technical discussion rather than
domain name commentary and the same old non-specific privacy concerns
discussed ad nauseam every day.

~~~
dang
> _it was unfortunate that this generic landing page was chosen_

You know what, you're exactly right. Generic pages lead to generic discussion
and that is uninteresting. We're well aware of that effect, so usually make a
point of penalizing generic portal-style pages or changing the HN URLs to more
substantive ones. For some reason we missed this case.

It's interesting as yet another demonstration of how reliable that effect is,
I guess. Initial conditions have a huge impact on HN threads. First comment is
another.

~~~
modeless
Cheers, and thanks for keeping HN the best technical news discussion site
around :)

------
unixhero
Holy shit

------
mlindner
Looks like Google is trying marketing spin to make what it does sound less
evil.

~~~
rytilu
I've seen this viewpoint a few times around here and I'm undecided on this
topic myself. Care to elaborate?

------
dogecoinbase
"Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally
accessible and useful..."

As good a time as any for a reminder of how this philosophy actually plays out
at Google:
[https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-t...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-
tragedy-of-google-books/523320/)

------
delbel
Bringing the benefits of AI to everyone... even if its against your will...
this will be used for evil. Mark my words. Totaliatrian governments of the
future will leverage this technology, combined with controlling the
populations' political discourse. Don't believe me? It's already happened on a
massive scale both last election and recently before that: Facebook
Manipulated 689,003 Users' Emotions For Science

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/06/28/facebook...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/06/28/facebook-
manipulated-689003-users-emotions-for-science/#5e96cfc0197c)

~~~
naasking
But if it's really AI for everyone, then it can be used by the people against
their government as well.

~~~
mikeyouse
_In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under
bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread._

There's no comparing the incentives, resources, and potential for harm between
the state and citizens.

~~~
naasking
I think you seriously underestimate the people, and seriously overestimate the
government.

The point being, the harm the government is doing right now is obscured from
the people, but with AI trawling all public data, these issues can be revealed
much sooner.

~~~
BoiledCabbage
I find this naive. One day every 2-4years the govt answers to the people.
Every other days is story after story of the govt bending to the will of
powerful/wealthy special interests.

Giving each side force multipliers doesn't even the playing field, it makes
the absolute gap even larger.

~~~
naasking
Firstly, you're incorrect that the government answers to the people only on
elections. They lose plenty in the courts against ordinary citizens.

Secondly, your point would be valid if the force multipliers applied equally.
This likely isn't true.

So which side gains more advantage? If the government could sufficiently
obscure their actions such that the data weren't available to analyze, that
would give it the advantage. However, the government is constrained by certain
transparency requirements that don't apply to citizens, so by default,
citizens know more about their representatives than their representatives know
about their citizens.

~~~
BoiledCabbage
> Firstly, you're incorrect that the government answers to the people only on
> elections. They lose plenty in the courts against ordinary citizens.

The executive branch losing a court case isn't answering to the people. It's
answering to the judicial branch. Being granted explicit permission as a
citizen to do something you legally should be allowed to do isn't gaining
anything at all. An innocent person being allowed to remain innocent again
isn't giving anything to citizens. Those are basic rights..

> If the government could sufficiently obscure their actions such that the
> data weren't available to analyze, that would give it the advantage

The govt already does this across the board. I'm not certain how you could
argue otherwise. Taking a issue in the news recently, we still don't have
national rates on use of force by the police across the country. As in
literally no-one knows what the police is doing because centralized records
aren't kept, and every area does it differently. Police departments have
fought body cameras. Fought enabling citizens to even see how they are
executing their jobs.

It was a sliver of data available under Obama (although to his credit, his
admin tried to improve it), and yet:
[https://www.engadget.com/2017/04/14/trump-admin-killing-
open...](https://www.engadget.com/2017/04/14/trump-admin-killing-open-data-
portal/)

