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Google says robots are going to be bigger than search

Machine learning is the hot new thing in Silicon Valley.

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In an interview with the Times, Google cloud executive Urs Hölzle predicted that the business of renting out machine learning capabilities will one day overtake the company's advertising revenue.

To put that in perspective, search ads made Google an eye-popping $16.4 billion in profits in 2015. 

Google driverless car
What drives a driverless car? Machine learning. AP/Tony Avelar

Machine learning is a branch of computer science where algorithms can train themselves in pattern recognition. Crucially, it doesn't require a programmer to orient the algorithm to what works or doesn't work in a given domain — it can learn on its own.

The most famous recent example is AlphaGo, the bot that just beat a human champion in the ancient, seemingly impossible to master game of Go — where there are more possible game states than atoms in the universe.

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Google didn't "program" AlphaGo with evaluations of "good" and "bad" moves. Instead, AlphaGo's algorithms studied a database of online Go matches, giving it the equivalent experience of doing nothing but playing Go for 80 years straight.

What machine learning needs to succeed is massive amounts of data. That puts Google in an amazing position to bring machine learning to market. The Times' Quentin Hardy reports that on its own, Gmail "sifts through 1.4 petabytes of data, or roughly two billion books’ worth of information, every day."

But Google — which presumably will be using lots of machine learning in its quest for a driverless car — isn't alone in this gold rush.

Industries as diverse as advertising, energy, cars, medicine, and finance are all being touched by machine learning. The responsibilities of $350,000 a year jobs at Goldman Sachs are already being automated

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And Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella just declared that chatbots — powered by machine learning — are going to define the next era of tech, after smartphones and apps.  

Hopefully they won't turn racist.

On February 28, Axel Springer, Business Insider's parent company, joined 31 other media groups and filed a $2.3 billion suit against Google in Dutch court, alleging losses suffered due to the company's advertising practices.

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