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Thursday, January 31, 2013

Dumb AI Size Queens

No matter how big Big Data gets it will still be dumb data.

More Futurological Brickbats here.

4 comments:

jimf said...

> No matter how big Big Data gets it will still be dumb data.

We were expecting Diaspar's 'Central Computer' and Robby
and HAL and Colossus, and we got. . . Google.

It won't wash your dishes, or provide scintillating dinner conversation,
or pilot spaceships, or stop wars.

But it's still pretty cool.

One frustrating thing about the term "artificial intelligence"
is that in the **real world** (as opposed to the world of
SF tropes, where everybody knows pretty much exactly what it means)
the phrase can be equivocated into meaning pretty much
anything you're selling (or asking for grant money or investor
money to build).

Is Google an "artificial intelligence"? Well, it ain't HAL,
that's for sure. In a way, it's both more and less. It's
far more useful to vastly more people than HAL was in
Clarke's and Kubrick's world of 2001 projected forward from 1968.

Using it feels like driving a car. It's an extraordinarily
powerful tool that we all take for granted and about which
we're only dimly aware of how it works. And the more skillfully
you use it, the more rewarding it is.

But it certainly does count as "Big Data".

And the hardware and software behind it is pretty impressive, too
(even though nobody but Google's upper management knows
exactly what it is).

> Size Queens

http://www.alertra.com/blog/2012/googles-world-dominating-supercomputer
--------------------------
No one knows exactly how many physical servers Google has. But
there are people out there going to great lengths to find out. This post
[ https://plus.google.com/114250946512808775436/posts/VaQu9sNxJuY ]
has a great description of the calculations done to
determine a good estimate of Google’s computing resources. The
numbers we’re using come directly from those calculations.
Now, getting back to the awesomeness of Google’s computing power...

Currently Google has an estimated 1.7 million physical servers.
By early 2013 they will have about 2.3 million (several new datacenters
will be completed then).

Those are huge numbers that are hard to comprehend even for the
geekiest geek. But it gets even more astounding when you discover
how much power that really is. For comparison, let’s look at the
world’s most powerful supercomputer as determined by the Top 500:
IBM’s Sequoia supercomputer. It has 1,572,864 cores and runs at
16.32 Petaflops.

If Google were to link ALL its computing resources together
(as it did the 600,000 cores at the demo) it would have 13.6 million cores.
About 21 times more than today’s largest supercomputer.

Next year it would approach 19.2 million cores. That is 30 times bigger
than IBM’s Sequoia.

Dale Carrico said...

"Artificial Intelligence" is an unintelligent description of unintelligent artifacts by unintelligent people.

Esebian said...

"Artificial Intelligence" is the sanewashed version of the notion of a perfect, because disembodied, slave?

Dale Carrico said...

The slave, the reduction of somebody to body and hence nobody, now refigured by AI adherents as a no body capable of no thing... who knows what fancies or errors have enthralled them, how artificially imbecillent they are!