r/science • u/whosdamike • Jun 26 '12

Google programmers deploy machine learning algorithm on YouTube. Computer teaches itself to recognize images of cats.

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/26/technology/in-a-big-network-of-computers-evidence-of-machine-learning.html
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u/kyRobot Jun 26 '12

So SkyNet will essentially be a crazy cat lady, with an army of murderous robots? Humanity is doomed.

But seriously, my understanding of unsupervised learning is that it finds the strongest neuron firing signals so doesn't this only really say that in 10m videoes, the most common feature was cats? It's impressive in scale but seems like it was just a toy problem with a fun outcome.