A.I. Spring for Silicon Valley Start-ups and Google’s Silent Ambition to Conquer the Robot Industry

Currently in Silicon Valley start-up companies specializing in or utilizing A.I. technologies, especially machine learning, have sprung up one after another.
Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) is not a new technology, with its research and development roots going back to the 1950s. The idea was to make computers and machines think and act intelligently, just like humans. However, after initial excitement in this early stage, A.I. entered a long setback period, commonly known as the ‘A.I. Winter’, which endured for an extended period of time.
A.I. showed early signs of come back in 1997, when IBM’s Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov, the then world chess champion, and since has gradually picked up momentum once more. Presently, A.I. is everywhere, being fundamental to Apple’s ‘Siri’, Google’s voice search and the ‘Self-Driving Car’, IBM’s ‘Watson’, Microsoft’s ‘Cortana’ and the list goes on.
What brought about this dramatic revival of A.I. is so-called “machine learning,” which is now a main branch of A.I. technology, that enables computers and machines to learn on their own by extracting notable patterns from ‘Big Data’.
Some of the A.I. start-ups in Silicon Valley are now providing this machine learning technology as SaaS (otherwise known as ‘Cloud Computing’), which could revolutionize a wide range of industries, not only in the U.S., but eventually throughout the entire world. Major companies are onboard, too, of course. Google, for example, seems to have begun the development of the next generation intelligent robots by building machine learning technology into them, and this development could be a serious threat to Japan’s mighty robot industry in the near future.
This report focuses on the frontiers of such various A.I. developments outlined above.
(8/26：リバイズド版に更新)