By Ciara Brady on 6 Nov 2019
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Wolfgang Bites: Watch - Google Has A Secret Plan
Wolfgang Bites: Read - Google Has A Secret Plan
In this weeks Wolfgang Bites Al reveals that Google has a secret mission, and they've been screaming this secret plan from the rooftops for the last 20 years...we just didn't know it.
In 2017 Google's CEO Sundar Pichai announced that Google is now an AI first company. However, there's evidence they've been thinking this way for an awful lot longer than they're letting on. Kevin Kelly in his recent book, The Inevitable, reveals he had a private conversation with Larry Page all the way back in 2002 at a Silicon Valley party and in this conversation Larry Page revealed that they're really building an AI company. So, this tells us Google's been working to a secret plan for 15 years or more, amazing.
I love this, I think a lot of the world's best businesses have secret plans. McDonald's looks like it sells hamburgers, it's actually a property company. Littlewoods look like they sell dresses, they're actually a bank. So, Google are revealing to us, rather Kevin Kelly is revealing to us by publishing a private conversation that Google have a secret plan to actually become an AI company.
Google's stated mission is to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible to everyone in the world, thus positioning themselves as the gatekeepers between the world's information and the world's people. I believe that Google has a secret mission, and that secret mission is to monitor the world's interactions with the world's information. That's how machine learning learns. What Google would be doing if this really is their secret plan, is building the world's biggest and the world's best dataset. Data is oxygen to AI. So, we're going to do one or two exercises just to interrogate this hypothesis that they've really been doing this in the background all the time.
Exercise 1
Have a little think about how many Google products you've used so far today. We know there's one, because you're watching this on YouTube, but have a think about what other Google products you've used today. For lots of you there might be two more, for some of you there might be even be four or more Google products that have played a part of your life today. This is a brilliant illustration of how entwined Google has become with our day to day lives.
The next question I'd like to ask you is how much are you paying for those products? It's free, nothing. They're idiots Google, they could have made so much more money if they just charged us for all these cool free tools that are so useful for us in our day to day. The reason they haven't charged us is the plan has always been to build the biggest and best dataset, data is oxygen to AI. Why would they put a cost barrier between you using the Google products to literally digitiSe your lives and help them build that dataset? That's a pretty compelling illustration. There are over 250 of those Google products can you believe.
Exercise 2
We'll do another exercise to illustrate this point. I'm going to ask you to pause the video in a second and go and conduct a search for the world's biggest number. What's the biggest number in the world? Press pause now…
Hey, welcome back. You'll have seen a couple of words you recognise there, right? You'll have seen the word google, you'll have seen the word googolplex. I took some time to try and understand the relationship between a google and a googolplex, and I pulled a muscle in my prefrontal cortex. So, I don't know exactly what it is, but a googolplex is something like a google to the power of a google, something like that.
Anyhow, back to the matter at hand. What we're seeing here is that they literally named the company after their information intention. In calling themselves Google all the way back in 1998, they're telling us, or this information company is telling us, it wants to build the world's largest dataset.
They've been screaming this secret mission from the rooftops for the last 20 years. We've all been working for them for free. Act one of this magnificent business plan was to capture revenue via the advertising industry. They now own 31% of the advertising spend in the world. Act two of this astonishing feat of vision for me is then to use this data set to plug AI into all the industries in the world, and that is going to be a far more valuable company and exciting opportunity I believe.
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