Four Tech Giants Get Serious About Deep Learning

  • GOOGLE
  • Google launched the deep-learning-focused Google Brain project in 2011, introduced neural nets into its speech-recognition products in mid-2012, and retained neural nets pioneer Geoffrey Hinton in March 2013. It now has more than 1,000 deep-learning projects underway, it says, extending across search, Android, Gmail, photo, maps, translate, YouTube, and self-driving cars. In 2014 it bought DeepMind, whose deep reinforcement learning project, AlphaGo, defeated the world’s go champion, Lee Sedol, in March, achieving an artificial intelligence landmark.
  • MICROSOFT
  • Microsoft introduced deep learning into its commercial speech-recognition products, including Bing voice search and X-Box voice commands, during the first half of 2011. The company now uses neural nets for its search rankings, photo search, translation systems, and more. “It’s hard to convey the pervasive impact this has had,” says Lee. Last year it won the key image-recognition contest, and in September it scored a record low error rate on a speech-recognition benchmark: 6.3%.
  • FACEBOOK
  • In December 2013, Facebook hired French neural nets innovator Yann LeCun to direct its new AI research lab. Facebook uses neural nets to translate about 2 billion user posts per day in more than 40 languages, and says its translations are seen by 800 million users a day. (About half its community does not speak English.) Facebook also uses neural nets for photo search and photo organization, and it’s working on a feature that would generate spoken captions for untagged photos that could be used by the visually impaired.
  • BAIDU
  • In May 2014, Baidu hired Andrew Ng, who had earlier helped launch and lead the Google Brain project, to lead its research lab. China’s leading search and web services site, Baidu uses neural nets for speech recognition, translation, photo search, and a self-driving car project, among others. Speech recognition is key in China, a mobile-first society whose main language, Mandarin, is difficult to type into a device. The number of customers interfacing by speech has tripled in the past 18 months, Baidu says.