Building A.I. That Can Build A.I.
SAN FRANCISCO — They are a dream of researchers but perhaps a nightmare for highly skilled computer programmers: artificially intelligent machines that can build other artificially intelligent machines.
With recent speeches in both Silicon Valley and China, Jeff Dean, one of Google’s leading engineers, spotlighted a Google project called AutoML. ML is short for machine learning, referring to computer algorithms that can learn to perform particular tasks on their own by analyzing data. AutoML, in turn, is a machine-learning algorithm that learns to build other machine-learning algorithms.
With it, Google may soon find a way to create A.I. technology that can partly take the humans out of building the A.I. systems that many believe are the future of the technology industry.
The project is part of a much larger effort to bring the latest and greatest A.I. techniques to a wider collection of companies and software developers.
The tech industry is promising everything from smartphone apps that can recognize faces to cars that can drive on their own. But by some estimates, only 10,000 people worldwide have the education, experience and talent needed to build the complex and sometimes mysterious mathematical algorithms that will drive this new breed of artificial intelligence.
The world’s largest tech businesses, including Google, Facebook and Microsoft, sometimes pay millions of dollars a year to A.I. experts, effectively cornering the market for this hard-to-find talent. The shortage isn’t going away anytime soon, just because mastering these skills takes years of work.
The industry is not willing to wait. Companies are developing all sorts of tools that will make it easier for any operation to build its own A.I. software, including things like image and speech recognition services and online chatbots.
“We are following the same path that computer science has followed with every new type of technology,” said Joseph Sirosh, a vice president at Microsoft, which recently unveiled a tool to help coders build deep neural networks, a type of computer algorithm that is driving much of the recent progress in the A.I. field. “We are eliminating a lot of the heavy lifting.”
This is not altruism. Researchers like Mr. Dean believe that if more people and companies are working on artificial intelligence, it will propel their own research. At the same time, companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft see serious money in the trend that Mr. Sirosh described. All of them are selling cloud-computing services that can help other businesses and developers build A.I.