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Google engineer: AI is a serious risk to our business
On Wed, Dec 26, 2018 at 4:48 PM Eric Lehman wrote:
I’d like to offer a thought for contemplation over the break:
Within the near future, a deep ML system will clearly outperform Google’s 20-year accumulation of relevance algorithms for web search.
Here, I’m just talking about relevance; that is, determining whether a document and query are talking about the same thing. There is a lot more to web ranking for which ML seems much less appropriate. But I think basic relevance is the major task in web ranking and probably “objective” enough to go after pretty effectively with ML.
None of us can see the future, but my bet is that this is nearly certain to be true within 5 years and could be true even within 6 months. One problem after another that is similar in flavor to web ranking has fallen, and there is little reason to think that web ranking is somehow exceptional. Indeed, this holiday thought stems from recent advances in web answers, where deep ML (in the form of BERT) abruptly subsumed essentially all preceding work.
For the web answers team, the tidal wave of deep ML that arrived in the last few weeks was a complete shock. With this warning, we should not allow ourselves to be caught off-guard again; rather, we should start thinking through the implications now. And *now* is really the time, because in the new year I expect a lot of web ranking engineers to reflect on BERT and start thinking along these same lines.