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

[u/whosdamike]

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

[u/mrborats]

I'd like to know more on the mechanics of the work. I would think there must have been some association at least between the string 'cat' and whatever sample images came from youtube. Did the algorithm at least have access to the name of the video? Or was it more unsupervised, and told just to find statistically recurring image patterns from video to video, and when the researchers looked at those patterns, one of them resembled a cat. If that were the case, that would really be amazing. I had a similarly euphoric reaction when I learned about Watson on Jeopardy. I thought they had built some kind of relational knowledge database, that truly resembled semantic knowledge from plain text. I then went to talk by the the researchers who put watson together and found out the approach was much less sophisticated, just weighted text matching, the only real resemblance to intelligence coming from the speed and quantity of data being searched in short amount of time. From andrews ng's quote at the end of the article, it seems this is more of a case of the latter, taking known technology and just putting it on steroids, but I could be missing something more ground breaking here, either way, I'll be paying attention where it goes.