Google's AI Products
Since 2015, Google has been a subsidary of the company Alphabet Inc,
the eleventh largest company in the world (Forbes,
2022),
and the second largest company in the technology industry. Currently, some subsidaries of
Alphabet Inc that are specialising in artificial intelligence include:
DeepMind,
Google AI as a subsidary of Google,
Isomorphic Labs, and
Waymo.
Deepmind was actually acquired by Google, in 2014
(DeepMind, 2022), before Google's
restructuring into the umbrella company, Alphabet Inc.
There are other deep ties between Google and Alphabet Inc too, so for this page, I will be
outlining and reviewing tools that are attributed to Alphabet Inc
as well as those of Google.
DeepMind's AlphaFold
AlphaFold is an AI system used to predict the shape of proteins,
from their amino acid sequence. There are over 200 million known proteins, but only a fraction
of them have had their shape experimentally determined. Part of the
importance of understanding protein folding, is due to the shape of proteins being a factor in
the design of contemporary medicine
(MIT, 2020).
While AlphaFold itself isn't open to the public as a tool, the predictions it makes are
available to researchers here:
AlphaFold Protein Structure Database.
The scientific achievement of AlphaFold can't really be overstated as it currently outperforms
any other protein folding predictive system in accuracy.
(MIT, 2020).
This is arguable one of the greatest achievements of artificial intelligence so far, because of
our lives dependency on medicine.
DeepMind's AlphaGo
AlphaGo is the first AI system that was able to defeat a professional human Go player. This is the also the first AI system that caught my attention in 2015, and inspired me to begin learning Python. Unfortunately, AlphaGo can not be played against by the public, so I've never had a chance of playing it. That's slightly disappointing in my opinion. Beyond entertainment, AlphaGo's value is less clear. Even the most recent version, MuZero, only plays games. A trend of gameifying real world systems may upgrade MuZero's applicability, but MuZero today lacks constraints that ensure the games that it plays are ethically acceptable.
Google Assistant
Google Assistant is a virtual
assistant software that comes prepackaged on Android phones.
Even though I have an android phone, I rarely use Google Assistant because it doesn't really
provide anything more than a speech-based interface to me. For a phone with a screen,
it's easier for me to point and touch the apps that I want to use, using the visual cues I'm
given; instead of trying to remember how something needs to be said to Google Assistant
in order to get it to perform as I would have liked. Google Assistant is challenged by context
analysis and incomplete commands, but more so by limitations of preprogramming responses.
I think one of the ways that Google Assistant could be improved is by allowing the programming
and installation of new keyword commands for it by indie developers.
I might also have found Google Assistant more useful, if I actually owned anything else that
could connect to it.
Google Cloud's AI and Machine Learning Products
Google Cloud offers a range of AI and Machine Learning Products, focusing on data scientists and developers. Some of the products it provides are:
- Machine learning operation guides and tools
- Optimised infrastructure for machine learning including environments, processing units and expert support
- Natural language processing services
- Image and video processing services
Google Translate
Google Translate is a tool that
I've had first hand experience with, I was an english language
teacher to students who were not native english speakers. Every now and then I would receive
some homework off a student, that had unusually technical vocabulary,
an overly formal tone, and the odd misplaced punctuation artefact or mispelt foreign word,
typically and suspicially typed instead of handwritten.
These were the times that I had noticed Google Translate had been used.
From my own observations, for lower levels of English, upto around B2 CEFR
level, Google Translate is superb. Once figurative, cohesive and technical language are
introduced to Google Translate though, it does a less adequate job.
I still find alot of value in Google Translate though, especially for navigating foreign web
pages.
Isomorphic Lab's Digital Biology
Digital Biology is a field that has emerged as a result of the success of DeepMind's AlphaFold, with the aim of accelerating drug discovery using AI. There's not much information available about the methodology of digital biology that makes it distinct to computational biology, other than an association: AI is to biology, what maths is to physics.
Quick, Draw!
Quick, Draw! is an experimental game in which players are told to draw something, and an AI guesses what it is. The drawings then provide further data upon which AI can be trained. I used Quick, Draw! as a recreational activity while teaching english language to students who were not native english speakers. My students found it a really fun way to practise their vocabulary. I especially liked the fact that learning was happening in both my students and the AI. This game is a genuine inspiration to me, and I would like to extend this type of educational technology, and create an "I-Spy" derivative.
Tensorflow
TensorFlow is a programming library for machine-learning. It provides low-level classes and functions for building state of the art deep learning models. TensorFlow is also used as a backend for simpler libraries such as Keras which has a a simpler API at the cost of less customisation.
Waymo
Waymo is a self driving car.
Youtube's Automatic Captioning
Youtube is a subsidary of Google, with an automatic captioning feature for videos hosted on it. The captions are generated using natural language processing models. This feature saves a lot of time for Youtube content creators.