The resounding win by a Google artificial intelligence programme over a champion in the complex board game Go this month was a statement - not so much to professional game players as to Google's competitors.
Many of the tech industry's biggest companies, like Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft, are jockeying to become the go-to company for AI In the industry's lingo, the companies are engaged in a "platform war".
A platform, in technology, is essentially a piece of software that other companies build on and that consumers cannot do without. Become the platform and huge profits will follow. Microsoft dominated personal computers because its Windows software became the centre of the consumer software world. Google has come to dominate the Internet through its ubiquitous search bar.
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If true believers in AI are correct that this long-promised technology is ready for the mainstream, the company that controls AI could steer the tech industry for years to come.
"Whoever wins this race will dominate the next stage of the information age," said Pedro Domingos, a machine learning specialist and the author of "The Master Algorithm," a 2015 book that contends that AI and big-data technology will remake the world.
In this fight - no doubt in its early stages - the big tech companies are engaged in tit-for-tat publicity stunts, circling the same start-ups that could provide the technology pieces they are missing and, perhaps most important, trying to hire the same brains.
For years, tech companies have used man-versus-machine competitions to show they are making progress on AI. In 1997, an IBM computer beat chess legend Garry Kasparov. Five years ago, IBM went further when its Watson system won a three-day match on the television trivia show "Jeopardy!" Today, Watson is the centrepiece of IBM's AI efforts.
Now, Google's AI programme is drawing additional attention and pointing to a consolidation among the biggest firms.
By 2020, the market for machine learning applications will reach $40 billion, IDC, a market research firm, estimates. And 60 per cent of those applications, the firm predicts, will run on the platform software of four companies - Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft.
In January, before the Google software's latest Go victory, the scientific journal Nature published an article describing how the programme had beaten a European Go champion in five consecutive matches, overshadowing an effort by another tech giant, Facebook, to promote its own powerful Go-playing AI software. Google's software went on to beat the Go grandmaster Lee Se-dol 4-1 in South Korea this month.
IBM is making the broadest entry into AI. Its Watson unit, set up as a separate division in early 2014, is both a software and a services business, with technology tailored to specific industries. More than 80,000 developers have downloaded and tried out the software, and the Watson division has 500 industry partners, including big companies and start-ups. "It's early days, but the long-term goal is to have hundreds of millions of people use Watson as self-service AI," said David Kenny, general manager of the Watson division.
In 2015, Amazon and Microsoft both added machine learning capabilities to their cloud software platforms, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. The companies are using machine learning software to help customers spot patterns and make predictions in vast amounts of data. Microsoft offers 18 machine learning services, including face recognition, text analysis and product recommendations. More AI capabilities, analysts say, should be announced at the month-end, when Microsoft hosts a large conference for software developers in San Francisco.
Google is opening its AI technology to outsiders, seeking to attract developers. Last November, Google made the core of the machine learning technology its engineers use, called TensorFlow, available as free-to-use open-source software.
Intelligent software applications will become commonplace, said Jeff Dean, a computer scientist who oversees Google's AI development. "And machine learning will touch every industry."
At Facebook, the AI vision is, at least for now, limited to its products.
Mike Schroepfer, the chief technology officer, said Facebook's image-recognition software was now used to select what pictures or videos to show in a user's news feed, based on a person's friend network and interests. "Before, the photo was a black box to us," he said. "And that's the most likely form this takes - a lot of things that add up to make the service steadily better on Facebook."
If products come first, a platform strategy typically takes shape later for the big consumer web companies. There are millions of Facebook app developers worldwide. Today, only about one per cent of all software apps have AI features, IDC estimates. By 2018, IDC predicts, at least 50 per cent of developers will include AI features in what they create.
© 2016 The New York Times News Service
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