AI（人工知能）にかける米シリコンバレーとGoogleの野望 ――危機に晒される日本の産業用ロボット

米シリコンバレーで今、「機械学習」を中心にAI関連のベンチャー企業が次々と生まれている。AI（人工知能）は1950年代に研究開発が始まった古い技術だが、その後、「AIの冬」と呼ばれる長い低迷期を脱し、最近、新たな形で蘇ってきた。その最大の理由が、機械学習の急激な発達にある。それはコンピュータや各種マシンがビッグデータを消化して、（ある面では）人間を遥かに凌ぐ知的能力を獲得する技術だ。
シリコンバレーのベンチャー企業は、これをクラウド型サービス（SaaS）として提供し、産業各界でAI革命を引き起こそうとしている。またGoogleはこれを使って日常社会で活躍する知的なサービス・ロボットを開発。日本が得意とする産業用ロボット市場に、挑戦状を突きつけようとしている。シリコンバレーで進むAI開発の最前線を追った。

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.