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Google's IPO marks the dawn of the Age of AI
Submitted by jesse on Fri, 08/20/2004 - 04:00.
Just as Sept 11 is regarded as the political/military start of the 21st century, so too will the Google IPO in time be regarded as the start of the economic/technologic side of this century.
Google represents a business model based on AI. Further, they've been the most successful at making AI a relevant and ubiquitous part of mass society, certainly at the individual consumer level.
They employ an incredible amount of AI PhDs, and own patents on all sorts of crazy little concepts and potential deployments of AI. For a while if you searched google for AI terms, the results were accompanied by an ad that said "Work for Google".
While we all tend to see Google as a search engine, we fail to see the infrastructure that is the engine itself. Google runs the largest computer system in the world, a distributed grid that combines countless machines across the globe into the premier computer cluster.
The computational power available via this cluster has yet to be fully harnessed, however Google has started providing access to its facility via
programs like their new webmail Gmail or their Blogger servcies.
The IPO, while less then they initially desired, will still raise enough money for them to take their business strategy to the next level. Providing mass consumer society with practical applications of AI, as well as continuing to feed the largest thinking machine in history.
We all recognize the merits of the Google search engine, and its ability to help us find information. When this same approach is applied to all the
informational aspects of our world, and begins to help us reframe the way we interact with computers and media, the age of AI will have begun.
While this may seem a little eery, if not Brave New World, the good news here is that this is Google and not Microsoft. The only reason Microsoft
has not pursued AI in the consumer market as aggressively is because as the world's most profitable company they are rather lazy. It's much better that it's Google who has initiated this era, however one can be sure that Microsoft will be quick to try and keep up once they too realize what's going on.
