Cats do rule the Internet, says Google

Google X Lab, which is the search giant’s secret laboratory for experiments such as Google glasses, has made a discovery that confirms what many of us already believed to be true. Cats are dominating the Internet. And just how did Google discover that? According to this BBC report, A Google research team wired up a network of 1,000 computers. The team built a neural network, in the hopes of mimicking the workings of a biological brain. And what did they find after randomly exposing the machine to to 10 million randomly selected YouTube video thumbnails over three days? The ‘brain’ began to recognise images of cats. This revelation thus vindicates the stand of those who’ve supported Cat Meme videos for years. Sorry doggie lovers, cats rule the Internet. [caption id=“attachment_358724” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“I’m your master and you will obey me. Reuters”]  [/caption] In a blogpost today, titled, Using large-scale brain simulations for machine learning and AI, Google wrote,

So we developed a distributed computing infrastructure for training large-scale neural networks. Then, we took an artificial neural network and spread the computation across 16,000 of our  CPU cores (in  our data centers), and trained models with more than 1 billion connections. We then ran experiments that asked, informally: If we think of our neural network as simulating a very small-scale “newborn brain,” and show it YouTube video for a week, what will it learn? Our hypothesis was that it would learn to recognize common objects in those videos. Indeed, to our amusement, one of our artificial neurons learned to respond strongly to pictures of… cats.

Google’s blogpost hints that this new technology will probably be developed further to help in its other businesses. From categorising online content to aid language translation, speech recognition, this neural experiment is part of making machine learning more accurate. Or in other words we are one step closer to ceding control of the world to machines. Meanwhile in less scary news, Google’s I/O developers conference is today. Click here to see what the rumour mills are saying.