Saturday, November 26, 2016

AI: Google Translate "interlingua" language

Scary AI: the translation machine is becoming a blackbox by self-learning.

Google Research Blog: Zero-Shot Translation with Google’s Multilingual Neural Machine Translation System
"... the network must be encoding something about the semantics of the sentence rather than simply memorizing phrase-to-phrase translations. We interpret this as a sign of existence of an interlingua in the network..."



Google Research Blog: A Neural Network for Machine Translation, at Production Scale

Google Translate's AI has created its own 'artificial language' known as interlingua | WIREDUK

An Infusion of AI Makes Google Translate More Powerful Than Ever | WIRED

Google's AI can translate language pairs it has never seen

Next HAL 9000 ?

Google’s AI can now lip read better than humans after watching thousands of hours of TV - The Verge

Google DeepMind could invent the next generation of AI by playing Starcraft 2 | Ars Technica



cloud business: AWS += Motorola Solutions

How Amazon stole Motorola from Microsoft - Business Insider
"Motorola Solutions ... employs around 14,000 and generated $5.8 billion in revenue over the last four quarters... As part of its move and cost cutting, Motorola is unplugging its data centers and going all-in in the cloud.
...
Within 6 to 7 months ... moved more than 200,000 (!?) servers, and 150 applications, and had more than $2 million in computer yearly spend moved over to AWS.
...
Azure had a crucial government security certification known as Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) and Amazon didn't... In a few months AWS were certified... so Motorola opted for AWS. 
...
There is one big downside to choosing Amazon: it's harder to keep track of costs.... AWS pricing model is very complicated, that is a drawback... Motorola hired a cloud consultant, 2nd Watch, to help it move to AWS, size everything properly, train the IT staff and set up its own internal systems for watching usage
...
Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through his personal investment company Bezos Expeditions."

Apparently AWS has very efficient core business (VM hosting), and many other services are added by ecosystem of third party partners, in similar way Microsoft does in enterprise. Even some other cloud providers are moving to focus on services. Is it "winner(s) take all" market?

Rackspace Launches Enhanced Version of Compass for Fanatical Support for AWS Customers
"Compass delivers valuable insights into AWS spending trends over time, opportunities to rightsize underutilized resources, comprehensive Reserved Instance (RI) purchase recommendations"
"Rackspace filed the final bits of paperwork and closed our transaction to become a private company,"

"Amazon Web Services (AWS) pricing on basic services declined 10% to 20% annually since 2014
...
So price cuts are stabilizing while the big three cloud vendors keep reducing costs from their infrastructure. That means that profit margins for the cloud providers should improve, which is good news for investors. And, the report’s authors conclude that the total market for public cloud is so huge and that cloud adoption rates are still so low, that there is room for all of the big cloud providers to grow—and profit—going forward."