Google’s AI hasn’t passed its biggest test
AN ADVERTISER boycott of YouTube is testing a critical and much-hyped part of Google’s future: Its prowess in artificial intelligence. Some experts in the field say the technology isn’t up to scratch yet, but that if any company can solve the problem at hand, it’s the online search giant.
Some of the world’s biggest marketers halted YouTube spending this month after ads from large brands were found running alongside hateful and extremist videos. Google parent Alphabet Inc. risks losing US$ 750 million ( RM3.4 billion) in revenue this year from the debacle, analysts at Nomura Instinet estimated this week.
That’s less than one per cent of projected sales this year, so it can weather the financial storm. But it’s likely an incentive for the company to re- direct AI investments and accelerate research efforts already underway.
To detect and police content across YouTube’s sprawling library, and ensure ads don’t run against questionable content, Google must solve an AI problem no one has cracked yet: Automatically understanding everything that’s going on in videos, including gesticulations and other human nuances.
A potential solution lies in machine learning, a powerful AI technique for automatically recognising patterns across reams of data – a Google speciality. Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai has pledged to infuse the technology across all its products, and the company touts its abilities in the field to software developers, cloud- computing clients, advertisers and shareholders.
Computer scientists doubt technology alone can expunge offensive videos. “We’re not there yet where we can, say, find all extremist content,” said Hany Farid, a Dartmouth professor and senior adviser to the Counter Extremism Project, which has repeatedly called on YouTube to tackle this problem. He recommends companies like Google and Facebook Inc. deploy more human editors to filter content.
“Machine learning, AI is nowhere near that yet,” he said. “Don’t believe the hype.”
The AI hype machine is running at full speed in Silicon Valley right now, as startups and technology giants like Google, Amazon and Microsoft compete to recruit engineers and scientists skilled in the field.
Google’s AI advances sometimes match the hype, but they are not perfect. The company’s cloud division recently released a tool (unrelated to YouTube) that breaks videos into their constituent parts, rendering them “searchable and discoverable.” A group of academics published research earlier this week that showed how to deceive this system by injecting images into videos.
Google has used machine learning and other AI tools to master speech, text and image recognition.
In 2012, researchers famously got a network of 16,000 computers to teach itself to recognise cats by scanning millions of still images culled from YouTube videos. — WP-Bloomberg