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The latest move in the race to control the future of the artificial intelligence technology was made by Google when it's artificial intelligence program had a resounding win over a champion Go player recently, most people were led to believe this win was a statement aimed at professional game players, it wasn't at all, it was a statement aimed squarely at Google's competitors in the artificial intelligence industry. These competitors are the industry's biggest companies like Microsoft, IBM and Amazon, they are all jockeying for position to become the go to company amongst all the companies that currently engaged in the platform war around artificial intelligence.
What the large tech companies want to achieve is similar to what Microsoft achieved with Windows software when it dominated consumer software for many years, and what Google is currently doing with its domination of the search engines, that is what these companies believe is at stake with artificial intelligence software, they all believe this software will be the new software that consumers cannot do without. Whoever becomes the dominant platform in the artificial intelligence market is sure to reap huge profits, and that is what they are playing for.
The true believers in artificial intelligence are currently saying that this long promised technology is ready for the mainstream today and the company that controls a will steer the tech industry for many years to come. Many people in this industry believe that AI combined with the data technology is going to remake the world as we know it. Currently all the big companies are really doing is engaging in tit-for-tat publicity stunts, most of them are just looking to buy any startup company that looks promising. By doing this they are not actually after what the company say's it will produce in a lot of cases but they want the brains behind those ideas.
The big companies need for fresh brains is even extending to them looking at PhD candidates in universities across America who are studying courses they believe are necessary for the future of artificial intelligence, like computer vision, and to give you some idea of how desperate they are to acquire these people some PhD students have been offered starting salaries in excess of $1 million per annum when they graduate.
For many years tech companies have used the man versus machine competitions to show how far artificial intelligence has advanced, the first one of these was in 1997 when an IBM program computer beat chess champion Garry Kasparov. Five years ago IBM again showed its new system when it won a three-day match on the television show Jeopardy, the software IBM use the that was called Watson and is today the centerpiece of all IBM efforts in artificial intelligence.
It seems that right now a few companies, Facebook and Google included are concentrating on getting artificial intelligence programs to play what is considered one of the most complicated games there is, Go, Google at first played against European champions and beat them all, but the game is most popular in Asia so its latest game was against the South Korean Grand Master, Google software won the series 4 games to 1. The conclusion is that artificial intelligence has come along way since 1997 but still has probably as far to go again before it will be the new must-have software.
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