Thread: Google creates 'computer brain'

Google creates 'computer brain' - and it immediately starts watching cat videos on YouTube

• 16,000 processors create brain-style 'neural network'
• Network learns by itself to identify cat faces
• Works with pool of 10 million images from YouTube

Google has created an 'artificial brain' from 16,000 computer processors, and sat it down with an internet connection.

There's a certain grim inevitability to the fact that the YouTube company's creation began watching stills from cat videos.

The team, led by Google's Dr Jeff Dean, used the 16,000 processor array to create a brain-style 'neural network' with more than a billion connections.

The team then fed it random images culled from 10 million YouTube videos - and let it 'learn' by itself.

Unsurprisingly, the machine focused in on cats.

'We never told it during the training, ‘This is a cat,'' said Dr. Dean. 'It basically invented the concept of a cat.'

'Contrary to what appears to be a widely-held intuition, our experimental results reveal that it is possible to train a face detector without having to label images as containing a face or not,' says the team in a paper published this week.

'We also find that the same network is sensitive to other high-level concepts such as cat faces and human bodies. Starting with these learned features, we trained our network to obtain 15.8% accuracy in recognizing 20,000 object categories from ImageNet, a leap of 70% relative improvement over the previous state-of-the-art.

The 'brain' was a creation of the company's 'blue sky ideas' lab, Google X.


Read more: Google creates 'artificial brain' - and it immediately starts watching cat videos | Mail Online