• Adobe CTO Abhay Parasnis says that the company, most famous for tools like Photoshop and Illustrator, is different from its Silicon Valley peers when it comes to artificial intelligence.
• Where Facebook, Google, and others are trying to build superpowerful general-purpose AI, Parasnis says that Adobe is focused on AI specifically for creativity, its core market.
• That focus helps Adobe hire top talent, Parasnis says: "If you have [a] passion for AI in computer vision or imaging or video, then guess which company is going to be at the leading edge of that, because that's who we are."
• Parasnis adds that one of his team's goals in developing AI is to constantly try to one-up Adobe's existing products: "You have to build something that makes today's successful product from Adobe look like it's not needed," he said. 
• Click here for more BI Prime stories.

Artificial intelligence is the single most profound shift in software in a decade, Adobe CTO Abhay Parasnis told Business Insider. He thinks the software giant's approach is different than most other companies trying to build the future AI — and it's that approach that helps it compete for top talent.

"There's a lot of noise right now and overhype around AI," Parasnis said.

In Adobe's view, the company can be successful in AI by focusing on a narrow set of goals, rather than try to outstrip  Microsoft, Google, and others, which have made great strides towards the goal of superpowerful, all-purpose artificial intelligences. He said that rather than compete head-on, Adobe thought "hey, what are the two or three areas where we have decades of expertise?" 

One of those areas was creativity. "We are training our AI to only understand the world of images, videos, designs, animation," he said. "We are not trying to make it a general purpose AI for anything. And so that gives us the chance to go super, super deep," as it did with the new AI-powered Photoshop Camera app that it just released this week.

Parasnis sees this focus as a boon to Adobe, helping it pick and choose its battles in the promising, but competitive, field of AI research. But this strategy is contingent, he said, on Adobe continuing to develop its expertise and its AI software — and, most challenging of all, continuing to find the right talent to build that AI.

The market for top AI talent is extremely crowded and competitive, especially given that Adobe is on the doorstep of companies like Facebook and Google. But Parasnis says that Adobe stays in the mix, in large part because of its focus on using AI for creativity. Any computer scientist interested in fields like using AI for better photo editing will naturally gravitate towards Adobe, he says, thanks to its prominence in that particular market.

"When I'm recruiting talent in AI and if I'm competing with the usual big companies, whether it's Google, Facebook, Microsoft, whoever's trying to recruit the same talent, if he or she is working on generic AI, then we are all on the same level playing field. But if I say, hey, if you have [a] passion for AI in computer vision or imaging or video, then guess which company is going to be at the leading edge of that because that's who we are," Parasnis said. 

'A deep and healthy sense of paranoia'

Parasnis says that a major part of the goal for its AI, which is called Adobe Sensei, is to continually disrupt what the company is already doing. The thinking: If AI really is the major shift that Parasnis and others believe that it is, then it should be able to continually one-up everything Adobe is already doing. And if that's the case, Parasnis says, then Adobe would rather discover the next big thing before somebody else does.

"There's a deep and healthy sense of paranoia that we cannot just say because we are the leaders or we invented this category that we can just now slow down and relax because this is an industry that doesn't respect yesterday's successes as much. You will get disrupted. And so a big focus for us is, can we disrupt ourselves?" Parasnis said. 

He said he tells his emerging products groups and research groups that they have to develop products that make Adobe's current offerings seem irrelevant.

"The mandate I give them is your job is to make our current cash cow products irrelevant, that you have to build something that makes today's successful product from Adobe look like it's not needed," Parasnis said. 

The new Photoshop Camera app, which uses AI effects to overlay colorful, bombastic effects over your photos, is meant to do just that — make Photoshop seem irrelevant, at least for some of the users, some of the times. Parasnis said that Photoshop Camera is just the first a series of AI-first apps.

"AI is going to play [an] extremely central and crucial [role], it already is today," Parasnis said.

Got a tip? Contact this reporter via email at pzaveri@businessinsider.com or Signal at 925-364-4258. You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Most maps of Louisiana aren't entirely right. Here's what the state really looks like.

• Microsoft said its researchers stored the Warner Bros. film "Superman" on a piece of quartz glass the size of a coaster.
• The feat was a proof of concept for a years-long effort to store data in glass. The researchers used a combination of laser optics and artificial intelligence.
• The glass is designed to last hundreds of years and withstand being baked, microwaved, scoured, doused in water, demagnetized, and subject to "other environmental threats."
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Microsoft said its researchers had produced a piece of glass that is 7.5 centimeters long and 2 millimeters thick and contains the entire 1978 film "Superman."

The feat is the culmination of years of research, made possible by recent advances in ultra-fast laser optics and artificial intelligence, Microsoft said on Monday.

Researchers used lasers to carve tiny three-dimensional etchings into the glass's surface that could be read by machine-learning algorithms trained to look at the patterns created when a light is shined through the glass.

The research builds on other Microsoft projects that aim to store data more efficiently in the long term. A concurrent project is centered on an invention dubbed Pelican that uses cold storage to preserve dozens of disk drives, The Register reported.

Microsoft isn't the only company exploring cutting-edge long-term storage tech. Millenniata, a startup founded in 2009, has said it developed ultra-durable DVDs that will be readable for 1,000 years.

Lab photos show the meticulous process behind Microsoft's latest accomplishment. Take a look:

SEE ALSO: Facial recognition is on the rise, but artificial intelligence is already being trained to recognize humans in new ways, including gait detection and heartbeat sensors

The project is meant to provide new ways to physically store information for long periods at a lower cost. Unlike film reels or microchips, which are relatively fragile and must be stored under certain conditions, the piece of quartz glass is "surprisingly hard to destroy," Microsoft said.

Source: Microsoft

The glass is designed to withstand being baked in an oven, microwaved, scoured with steel wool, demagnetized, and subject to "other environmental threats," the company said.

Source: Microsoft

The glass was encoded with a device called a femtosecond laser that releases extremely short pulses, allowing for a high level of detail.

Source: Microsoft

"One big thing we wanted to eliminate is this expensive cycle of moving and rewriting data to the next generation. We really want something you can put on the shelf for 50 or 100 or 1,000 years and forget about until you need it," Ant Rowstron, a partner deputy lab director of Microsoft Research Cambridge, said in the company's blog post.

Source: Microsoft

The lasers encode data in "voxels," a 3D unit carved directly into the glass. The 2-millimeter-thick glass can fit more than 100 layers of tiny voxels.

Source: Microsoft

Once the data is encoded, it can be retrieved by a system that uses artificial intelligence and optics.

Source: Microsoft

The researchers partnered with Warner Bros. to examine old film archives. Among the archives were radio serials preserved on record-sized glass discs from the 1940s, which were in good condition because of the resilience of the glass.

Source: Microsoft

"If you're old enough to remember rewinding and forwarding songs on cassette tapes, it can take a while to get to the part you want," Richard Black, Microsoft's principal research software engineer, said in the blog post. "By contrast, it's very rapid to read back from glass because you can move simultaneously within the x or y or z axis."

Source: Microsoft

"Storing the whole 'Superman' movie in glass and being able to read it out successfully is a major milestone," Mark Russinovich, Microsoft Azure's chief technology officer, said in the blog post. "I'm not saying all of the questions have been fully answered, but it looks like we're now in a phase where we're working on refinement and experimentation, rather asking the question 'can we do it?'"

Source: Microsoft

• Microsoft president Brad Smith spoke about the societal implications of tech at the Web Summit conference in Lisbon on Wednesday. 
• Touching on a range of topics ranging from human rights to neural networks, the 60-year-old said artificial intelligence will over the next three decades play a similar role to the internal combustion engine in transforming society during the first half of the twentieth century.
• Smith also emphasized the essentially value-neutral status of AI, arguing that we should ask what AI should do for society as much as asking what its technical capabilities are.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

LISBON — Microsoft president Brad Smith has predicted that artificial intelligence will transform society in the next three decades, just as the internal combustion engine did during the first half of the 20th century.

Smith was speaking at the Web Summit technology conference in Lisbon, Portugal on Wednesday, where he discussed the intersection between tech and society.

He said: "When we look to the decade ahead, in many respects AI will be a tool of the sort the world has seldom seen before, and hence it can become a weapon as well. When you look back at the first half of the twentieth century, it was a time that was transformed by one invention above all else: the combustion engine. 

"[The combustion engine] led to the car and the airplane; it led to the truck and the tractor; it changed every part of every economy. I think it's fair to say  that over the next three decades — from now to 2050 — AI is likely to play a similar role in the global economy."

Smith mused on what the societal implications might be, adding that the tech industry must take a broader outlook on the possible consequences of AI.

"It really calls on us [the tech industry] to think as never before about what this means in terms of broader societal implications. As we do so, I think it's actually helpful to start by reflecting on a fundamental fact: these are not new questions. This technology may be new, but these questions are as old as technology itself."

 The 60-year old, who also serves as Microsoft's chief legal officer, added that the topic of AI is an ethical as much as a technological one, urging the tech industry and society at large to remember this.

"In some ways, [this is] the fundamental question of our times. We shouldn't just ask what computers can do. We need to ask what they should do, and we need to think hard, because we are the first generation in the history of humanity who will empower machines to make decision that were previously only made by people. If we get it wrong, every generation that follows us will pay a price."

Smith has talked up the positive and negative implications of AI before, calling for greater regulation around applications such as facial recognition, for example. Other tech titans, such as Tesla CEO Elon Musk, have also made various doomsaying predictions about AI, with Musk predicting the technology couldsupercharge poisonous social media debate.

SEE ALSO: Microsoft President Brad Smith says these are the 10 biggest challenges facing tech in 2019

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Watch Google reveal the new Nest Mini, which is an updated Home Mini

• Microsoft's AI cloud platform, Azure AI, is at the center of CEO Satya Nadella's vision for the future of Microsoft.
• The platform has 20,000 customers, and more than 85% of Fortune 100 companies have used Azure AI in the past 12 months, according to the company.
• Azure AI takes technologies Microsoft already uses internally and sells them to customers.
• The company that figures out how to sell "pedestrian" uses for artificial intelligence will have an advantage in the cloud-computing business, the Gartner analyst Sid Nag said.
• The Redmond, Washington-based company has had to figure out how to transition its traditional businesses to use the cloud and artificial intelligence. That experience, plus its history working with enterprise customers, could give Microsoft an advantage in selling esoteric technologies like AI to nontech businesses.
• Click here for more BI Prime stories.

Microsoft formed a new group during a companywide reorganization last year charged with finding a way to sell the artificial-intelligence research and technologies already used in the Redmond, Washington-based company's products to customers.

Now the executive running the group says that it's a key differentiator for Microsoft's Azure cloud business against competitors, including the market-leading Amazon Web Services.

"We knew that customers wanted this," Eric Boyd, the corporate vice president of Microsoft's artificial-intelligence platform, Azure AI, told Business Insider. "Really it was this recognition of, 'How do we tap into all of the great learnings that we have both from our research division and from all of our product divisions and make it something?'"

Simplifying artificial intelligence and machine learning for cloud customers could make Microsoft more competitive in the fierce cloud-computing battle with AWS. Microsoft's cloud-computing business, Azure, is widely considered to be the second-place player against AWS, but it has gained significant ground, including scoring a much-contested $10 billion cloud-computing contract with the Pentagon.

Artificial intelligence is one of the technologies Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently said would play a key role in the company's future. Azure AI is at the center of it. The platform now has 20,000 customers, and more than 85% of Fortune 100 companies have used Azure AI in the past 12 months, according to the company.

The start of Azure AI

About 18 months ago, Microsoft reorganized, dismantling its traditional Windows organization in favor of a focus on cloud computing. Amid the shift, Microsoft formed new engineering teams: one for the cloud and artificial intelligence, and another for user experiences and devices including Windows. Boyd's group was created at that time.

Boyd joined Microsoft 10 years ago, first working with Bing Ads, the advertising business behind its Bing search engine.

"I love to tell the story, when I started, Bing lost $2.7 billion," he recently told Business Insider at his office overlooking the Seattle suburb of Bellevue. "Now it's profitable. It's massively profitable. We don't talk about those numbers."

Microsoft doesn't disclose revenue for Bing, but in its most recent annual filing said overall search-advertising revenue grew to $7.6 billion in fiscal year 2019, from just over $7 billion the year before. 

When his role shifted, the new group, centered around the Azure AI platform, was formed to find new commercial uses for technologies from Microsoft Research, the company's research subsidiary founded in 1991. Boyd's team is charged with finding ways to connect that research with products for customers.

Azure AI now sells the technologies that power Microsoft products, including the Xbox games console, the Hololens augmented-reality goggles, Bing, and the Office 365 productivity suite.

Understanding customers

Microsoft might have been slower to get into the cloud business than Amazon. When it comes to selling esoteric technologies like artificial intelligence to traditional companies, however, that might actually be an advantage.

Microsoft successfully figured out how to transform traditional businesses to use the cloud and artificial intelligence, such as transforming the nearly 30-year-old desktop-based Office software to cloud-based version Office 365.

"It's something we have gone through ourselves as a company," Boyd said. "The digital transformation that our customers are going through — we've gone through it. We understand the challenges they're going to face."

While AWS started primarily selling to startups (though has grown into serving larger customers), Microsoft has a long history of selling to even the biggest enterprise companies. Microsoft's history selling to enterprises helps it develop and sell the technology those customers need, Boyd said.

"We've worked with enterprises for decades," Boyd said. "We're pretty intimately involved with them and understand the challenges they have."

Microsoft has said Azure AI is being used for things like helping printer companies determine the best time to signal an ink shortage and recently unveiled new tools to make the platform simpler for companies to use.

There are millions of "mundane-sounding" applications of AI, Boyd said, and Microsoft wants to help companies find them — putting aside the application of AI towards exciting new fields like driverless cars, drone deliveries, and drug discovery, there are relatively simple things it can do today that can actually help customers with real problems.

"Every business and every application has the potential to be better by using AI," Boyd said. "That's really our job to take it from this place where it is now where it's difficult to get all these things to happen and make it so simple that it shows up in every part of the business and every part of the industry."

Divergent history

Gartner Research Vice President Sid Nag says that Microsoft might be on to something. The company that figures out how to sell "pedestrian" uses for artificial intelligence will have an advantage in the cloud computing business, he said. 

"AI has always been positioned as esoteric technology," Nag said. "The trouble with AI is everybody talks about it as it if it's going to solve world hunger. The challenge is to leverage AI for real-world use cases."

On that front, Amazon hasn't been sitting still: The company has been investing in its own AI tools and says it offers customers the "broadest and deepest set of tools" for machine learning.

More broadly, AWS has been making moves to counteract one of Microsoft's key advantages — the ability to appeal to enterprises. The company is hiring more marketing and salespeople capable of selling AWS to enterprise customers. 

"We are investing a lot more this year in sales force and marketing personnel mainly to handle a wider group of customers, an increasingly wide group of products — we continue to add thousands of products and features a year — and we continue to expand geographically,"Amazon Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky recently said of AWS.

Still, while Amazon may rule the cloud-computing market, there are reasons to believe that Boyd is right on when he says that Microsoft has an edge in knowing what customers want from AI.

"Microsoft history is different than Amazon history," Nag said. "Microsoft has always had a seat at the table in a business."

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: 5 things about the NFL that football fans may not know

• Oral hygiene company Oral-B released a new electric toothbrush that uses AI to improve brushing.
• The toothbrush tracks brushing patterns to give specific feedback when users brush too hard, or miss certain areas.
• An accompanying app lets you set goals and track brushing habits over time.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Oral-B's new Genius X toothbrush with AI technology went on sale in October, and I got a test version to try out. 

Artificial Intelligence has become available in more household items than ever, from washing machines to ovens to toilets, so a toothbrush isn't exactly unexpected. AI products are typically more expensive than their non-smart counterparts, and this is no exception. One of the best-selling and top-rated electric toothbrushes on the market sells for $40, while the Genius X goes for $220, or as much as $280 on Amazon.

Oral-B isn't the first company with the idea to apply AI to brushing your teeth. Last year, Colgate released a $100 AI toothbrush, which sold at Apple stores.

Oral-B says the AI for its toothbrush has "learned from thousands of brushing styles" to direct users to improve brushing. It tracks areas in the mouth that weren't brushed enough, and areas with too much pressure, which it displays in an accompanying app. 

Here are my thoughts and experiences using a $200, AI toothbrush:

SEE ALSO: A TikTok creator used a clever $5 hack to make an older iPhone look like the new $1,000 iPhone 11 Pro

I opened the Genius X box, which came with body, 3 heads, a charging case, and a manual.

The manual instructed me to download the app, which I did. From there, using it was really straightforward, and I didn't refer to the manual again.

The app syncs with your toothbrush to store your brushing data. When you brush, you can either have the app open or sync afterwards.

In the beginning, the app takes you through some settings and basic tutorials. You also have the option to connect with Amazon and set up refills of brush heads.

You can set a notification for when it's time to replace your brush head, which was one of the features I appreciated most.

You have the option to start a "dental care journey" if you have specific health goals you want to focus on. I chose gum protection.

The app asked me to assess my gums, then gave me a daily routine to follow, even telling which brush head was best and adjusting the settings on the toothbrush. This was probably the next best thing to have a dentist personalize a regimen.

Other features seemed less helpful. I couldn't imagine a scenario in which I would share my tongue cleaning streak on Facebook, for example.

The feedback from brushing was really useful. I found it made more sense to keep an eye on the app as I brushed, which updated in real time to show how I was doing, rather than checking afterwards and feeling like the app was scolding me.

Maybe it's silly, but it felt weirdly good to have the app tell me I did a great job.

There are also badges you can earn if you do certain things well.

Overall, this toothbrush is definitely more powerful than my $20-something electric toothbrush, and I like the ability to see the areas I'm missing, but until my dentist tells me it's life or death I can't justify spending hundreds of dollars on a toothbrush.

• Margrethe Vestager, the European Commissioner for Competition, offered a highly optimistic assessment of AI's potential impact on society, saying she sees "no limit to how AI can support what we do as humans." 
• Vestager was speaking at the Web Summit tech conference in Lisbon, Portugal on Thursday, where she tackled a range of topics relating to emerging technologies, personal data, and the conduct of tech giants such as Facebook.
• The Danish politician has recently taken up a role titled "Executive Vice President for A Europe Fit for the Digital Age." Though the role is effectively a continuation of her competition commission job, it includes increased powers and oversight, and will see her set the agenda for EU regulation of AI.
• Vestager has become notorious for meting out heavy punishments to the Silicon Valley tech giants in recent years as European Commissioner for Competition. It's arguably the most senior regulatory job in European politics.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager, a frequent opponent to Silicon Valley tech firms, says she sees "no limit to how AI can support what we do as humans." 

Given the Dane's status as arguably the most aggressive regulator of big tech on the planet — she hit Google with a €4.3 billion ($4.75 billion) fine in July 2018 and ordered Apple to pay Ireland back €13 billion ($14.3 billion) in "illegal" tax benefits in 2016 — Vestager's optimism about AI could be viewed as surprising.

On the flipside, her positivity about AI's potential could be viewed as highly consistent with strinent approach to regulating big tech: given how integral big tech is to AI research and development, Vestager's approach more likely reflects her keenness that big tech doesn't jeopardize AI's potential.

In September, the EU appointed Vestager to a role titled "Executive Vice President for A Europe fit for the Digital Age," effectively a continuation of her competition commission job, but with increased powers and oversight. It will see her set the agenda for the EU's regulation of artificial intelligence, among other regulatory duties.

Discussing the role at the Web Summit tech conference in Lisbon, Portugal on Thursday, Vestager said: "The first thing we will do is, of course, to listen very, very carefully, and we'll try to listen fast, because as we're speaking, AI is developing."

"That is wonderful, because I see no limits to how artificial intelligence can support what we want to do as humans," she continued. "Take climate change. I think we can be much more effective in fighting climate change if we use artificial intelligence.

"I think we can save people awful, stressful waiting time between having been examined by a doctor and having the result of that examination, and maybe also more precise results in doing that. So I think the benefits of using artificial intelligence [have] no limits," she said. 

"But we need to get in control of certain cornerstones so that we can trust it, and it has human oversight, and — very importantly — that it doesn't have bias."

SEE ALSO: EU Commissioner Vestager slammed Mark Zuckerberg for allowing lies in political ads: That's not democracy, it's 'manipulation'

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: 8 weird robots NASA wants to send to space

• Farmers are using artificial intelligence to help grow food by combatting disease and pests, oftentimes made worse by climate change, pesticide use, and monocropping.
• Drones and other robots equipped with computer vision collect data points from the farms' exisiting crops. 
• Through machine learning, farmers can monitor crops' nutrient levels, while also sheltering them from unpredictable and possibly damaging elements.
• Despite the promise of AI in agriculture, the high cost of this technology isn't a realistic solution for many local, small-scale farmers. 
• Watch the video above, part of the AI.Revolution series to learn more. 
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

In Leones, Argentina, a drone with a special camera flies low over 150 acres of wheat. It's able to check each stalk, one-by-one, spotting the beginnings of a fungal infection that could potentially threaten this year's crop. 

The flying robot is powered by computer vision: a kind of artificial intelligence being developed by start-ups around the world, and deployed by farmers looking for solutions that will help them grow food on an increasingly unpredictable planet.

Many food producers are struggling to manage threats to their crop like disease and pests, made worse by climate change, monocropping, and widespread pesticide use. 

Catching things early is key.

Taranis, a company that works with farms on four continents, flies high-definition cameras above fields to provides "the eyes."  

Machine learning — a kind of artificial intelligence that's trained on huge data sets and then learns on its own — is the "brains."

"I think that today, to increase yields in our lots, it's essential to have a technology that allows us to take decisions immediately," said Ernesto Agüero, the producer on San Francisco Farm in Argentina. 

The algorithm teaches itself to flag something as small as an individual insect, long before humans would usually identify the problem.

AI's ability to identify sea lice could save fisheries hundreds of millions of dollars

Similar technology is at work in Norway's fisheries, where stereoscopic cameras are a new weapon in the battle against sea lice, a pest that plagues farmers to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

The Norwegian government is considering making this technology, developed by a start-up called Aquabyte, a standard tool for farms across the country. 

Farmers annotated images to create the initial data set. Over time, the algorithm has continued to sharpen its skills with the goal of finding every individual louse.

But deploying computer vision is expensive, and for many it's still out of reach.

Despite computer vision's promise, many farmers can't afford this technology to save their products

Bigger industrial farms tried using computer vision to identify and remove sick pigs at the outset of an African swine fever epidemic that is sweeping China, according The New York Times.

But half of China's farms are small-scale operations like this one, where that wasn't an option. 

Chinese pig farmer Fan Chengyou lost everything.

"When the fever came, 398 pigs were buried alive," Chengyou said. "I really don't want to raise pigs anymore."

China — the world's biggest pork producing country — is expected to lose half its herd this year.

For many farmers in the world's major growing regions, 2019 was devastating.

Record flooding all along the Mississippi River Valley — the breadbasket of the United States — meant that many farmers couldn't plant anything at all this season.

And while computer vision can't stop extreme weather, it is at the heart of a growing trend that may eventually offer an alternative, sheltered from the elements.

Indoor farming could be key in fighting climate change

"Indoor growing powered by artificial intelligence is the future," said Josh Lessing, co-founder and CEO of Root AI, a research company that develops robots to assist in-door farmers. 

Computer vision has taught a fruit-picking robot named Virgo to figure out which tomatoes are ripe, and how to pick them gently, so that a hot house can harvest just the tomatoes that are ready, and let the rest keep growing. 

The Boston-based start-up is installing them at a handful commercial greenhouses in Canada starting in 2020.

80 Acres Farms, another pioneer in indoor growing, opened what it says is the world's first fully-automated indoor growing facility just last year.

The company, based in Cincinnati, currently has seven facilities in the United States, and plans to expand internationally over the next six months. Artificial intelligence monitors every step of the growing process.

"We can tell when a leaf is developing and if there are any nutrient deficiencies, necrosis, whatever might be happening to the leaf," said 80 Acres Farms, CEO, Mike Zelkind. "We can identify pest issues, we can identify a whole variety of things with vision systems today that we can also process."

Because the lettuce and vine crops are grown under colored LED lights, technicians can even manage photosynthesis 

Thanks to the benefits of indoor-farming practices, Zelkind says 80 Acres Farms' crops grow faster and have the potential to be more nutrient-dense.

Humans need more than salad to survive, though. Experts say indoor farms will need to expand to a more diverse range to provide a comprehensive option for growing food, but the advances being made in this space are significant. 

AI-powered indoor agriculture is attracting a whole new breed of farmer.

Techies' interest in indoor farming is growing, even if they have limited experience in the field

New techie farmers are ambitious, but they are also realistic about what it takes to make AI work.

Ryan Pierce comes from a cloud computing background, but decided to jump into indoor growing, despite little to no experience in agriculture. Now, Pierce works for Fresh Impact Farms, an indoor farm in Arlington, VA.

"It's really sexy to talk about AI and machine learning, but a lot of people don't realize is the sheer amount of data points that you actually need for it to be worthwhile," Pierce said.

There is a ways to go before artificial intelligence can truly solve the issues facing agriculture today and in the future. 

Many AI projects are still in beta, and some have proven too good to be true. 

Still, the appetite is high for finding solutions at the intersection of data, dirt and the robots that are learning to help us grow food.

AI for agriculture is valued at $600 million, and expected to reach $2.6 billion by 2025. 

Join the conversation about this story »

• The deal count for VC-backed healthcare deals is on pace to reach an all-time high, according to the latest third quarter report from CB Insights. 
• Investments in AI companies has grown exponentially in the healthcare space. In the third quarter, healthcare AI companies raised almost $1.6 billion across 103 deals, CB Insights reports. 
• In 2019, the top 5 healthcare AI company deals raised a total of $1.1 billion in funding. 
• The companies include the early cancer detection company Freenome, which raised $160 million, and the virtual care and diagnostics platform Babylon Health, which raised $550 million. 
• Click here for more BI Prime stories.

Investors just poured a record sum of cash into startups looking to use artificial intelligence (AI) to change healthcare.

In the third quarter, healthcare AI companies raised almost $1.6 billion across 103 deals, according to a new report from CB Insights. That's a record sum, and an increase from the $749 million healthcare AI startups took in a year ago.

2019 is looking like a good year for venture-capital-backed healthcare deals overall. Global deal count is on pace to reach an all-time high, according to the CB Insights report. And in total, healthcare companies have raised over $37.5 billion so far this year, the report says.

Victor Adeleke, an associate analyst at CB Insights, said the reason for the wave of healthcare AI investments is the perception of the need to integrate AI into healthcare systems, particularly in drug discovery, medical imaging, and diagnostics. 

Another factor is that healthcare AI may help save costs, he said.

"There's also huge potential for AI to cut costs and drive efficiency across healthcare, and incumbents are looking to startups to help them compete with newer players entering the space," Adeleke told Business Insider via email.

Adeleke noted that the increased investment has coincided with more partnerships between pharmaceutical companies and AI startups.

The drug discovery company, BenevolentAI, which is on the list of top 5 healthcare AI deals this year, raised $90 million in equity funding in September, after partnering with AstraZeneca on AI-driven drug discovery in May.

A large part of the success for AI deals this year can be attributed to the newly-minted unicorn Babylon Health, which reached the $2 billion valuation mark with its recent funding round. The company provides virtual care by providing people with remote consultations with doctors and healthcare professionals via text and video messaging. 

Read on to see the five biggest deals driving the surge in healthcare AI funding this year.

5. BenevolentAI - $90 million

Company: Founded in 2013, the London-based company uses AI for drug discovery. BenevolentAI uses its drug discovery platform to help scientists find new ways to treat diseases and create personalized drug therapies. 

In September, the company raised $90 million from Singapore's Temasek.

"This year, we have demonstrated strong commercial and scientific progress and this funding will further scale our technology and support the development of our pipeline of potentially transformational medicines," Joanna Shields, CEO of BenevolentAI said in a statement announcing the Temasek investment.

Key investors: Woodford Investment Management, Lansdowne Partners, H. Lundbeck, Temasek

4. Recursion Pharmaceuticals - $121 million

Company: Founded in 2013 and headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah, the company is using AI for drug discovery. Essentially, Recursion is creating algorithms to predict important properties of potential new medicines.

In July, the company closed a series C funding round of $121 million, bringing the total amount raised to $360 million, according to PitchBook. 

"With these new resources, we will continue to drive toward a future in which drugs are developed—by people—with a new level of understanding about human biology that was simply not possible before machines," Chris Gibson, Recursion CEO said in a statement.

The company has two drugs in early-stage trials on people. 

Key investors: Data Collective, AME Cloud Ventures, Lux Capital, Felicis Ventures, Obvious Ventures, Epic Ventures

3. Freenome - $160 million

Company: Founded in 2014, the South San Francisco-based company is using AI to try and detect cancer early through blood tests. 

The company's initial research began in prostate cancer, but it has since moved on to colorectal cancer, which has been proven to respond well to early diagnosis and treatment. 

In July, the company closed a $160 million Series B funding round, bringing its total financing to $238 million. 

"We are fortunate to have an experienced and proven group of biotech and healthcare investors who share our mission of making early detection of cancer a routine part of patient care," Gabe Otte, CEO of Freenome, said in a statement. "In addition, we are excited to welcome several strategic investors who are committed to our mission. Each brings insight, expertise, and partnership opportunities to accelerate our path to positively impacting patient care."

Key investors: Andreessen Horowitz, GV, Polaris Partners, Verily Life Sciences, Founders Fund 

2. Tempus - $200 million

Company: Founded in 2015, the Chicago-based company gathers data from cancer patients on its platform, including genetic data from tumors and clinical data to see how well patients are responding to treatment. The aim is to help doctors find better cancer treatments for their patients. 

In May, the company raised $200 million  placing its valuation at $3.1 billion. In total, the company has raised $520 million since its founding. 

"From our founding, Tempus has been singularly focused on improving the lives of patients diagnosed with disease, starting with cancer," Eric Lefkofsky, founder and CEO at Tempus, said in a statement. "Three and a half years later, we are empowering stakeholders across healthcare with insights derived from real-world clinical evidence connected to rich molecular data."

Key investors: Baillie Gifford, Franklin Templeton, NEA, Novo Holdings, Revolution Growth, and funds and accounts managed by T. Rowe Price.

1. Babylon Health - $550 million

Company: The London-based company provides virtual care by providing people with remote consultations with doctors and healthcare professionals via text messaging and video. The chatbot is also used by the UK's National Health Service (NHS) to help connect people to a general practitioner. 

In August, the company closed a $550 million round of funding, putting its valuation at more than $2 billion, the company said.

"Our mission at Babylon is to put accessible and affordable healthcare into the hands of everyone on earth," said Dr. Ali Parsa, founder and CEO of Babylon, in a statement. "This investment will allow us to maximise the number of lives we touch across the world." 

Babylon's basic membership is free, giving members access to chat with the app, monitoring ones' health and allowing them to ask medical questions. With a membership that costs about £10 a month ($12.87) or £90 annually, you get consultations with a doctor and specialist referrals.

Key investors: Vostok New Ventures, Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, Kinnevik, Munich Re Ventures

• Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi says its a "myth" that artificial intelligence will be a job killer. He thinks people will need to develop new skill sets for new types of jobs. 
• "AI is going to automate a lot of what is done today, a lot of predictions that you have to make. AI can automate all of that, but then it actually elevate where people can provide value, it elevates where they can provide judgement, " Goodarzi told Business Insider.
• He says AI does have to developed thoughtfully by thinking about what AI is good for and being intentional with what's built, making sure to avoid bias when creating AI, and finding the right talent to build the technology.
• Those are the factors Intuit keeps in mind when developing AI. Goodarzi's view is that AI is here to stay and will accelerate over time, so he wants Intuit to leverage it to the best of its ability to provide benefit to their customers.
• Click here for more BI Prime stories.

Artificial intelligence is often associated with with automation and loss of jobs. 

But Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi thinks that's a myth. He said people will need to develop new skill sets for the types of jobs that will be available, but AI is not the job killer many think it is. 

"AI is going to automate a lot of what is done today, a lot of predictions that you have to make. AI can automate all of that, but then it actually elevates where people can provide value, it elevates where they can provide judgement, " Goodarzi told Business Insider. He says that this will create new, different jobs over time, though he acknowledges that  it is unclear what exactly those jobs will be. 

Goodarzi, whose company makes tax filing and accounting software, compares the situation to the advent of the internet.

"History is our best teacher. When the internet was coming around there was lots of concern that because of the internet, because of commerce, because of what you could now do that would be elimination of a lot of jobs and in fact it's created a lot of jobs," Goodarzi said. 

According to a report by the Brookings Institution earlier this year, roughly 36 million American jobs have a "high exposure" risk from automation, meaning that 70% of the job functions could be performed by machines. Some of the most at risk jobs are focused on manual labor tasks such as cooks, waiters, and clerical office workers.

While the rise of AI may create new jobs that — from a sheer numbers perspective — offset the loss of other jobs, most experts expect there to be challenges for workers. A person who loses a job in manual labor might not be fit to perform whatever new job is created by AI. 

AI is only as good as how it gets trained

Goodarzi took the top job as Intuit's CEO in January, replacing longtime boss Brad Smith, who doubled Intuit's revenue and customers during his 11 year stint in the CEO job.

That leaves some big shoes to fill for Goodarzi, as well as some new challenges to confront at the helm of the public company with a $67 billion market valuation. 

He acknowledges that getting AI right won't be easy. 

AI must be developed thoughtfully and for good purpose, he says. And he calls out three areas — being very intentional about what AI is good for, making sure to avoid bias when creating AI, and finding the right talent to build the technology — as the key challenges facing Intuit as it develops AI. 

"Machine learning at the end of the day takes input and it makes a recommendation, and if something has to rely on one hundred percent accuracy, machine learning probably wouldn't be good for that," Goodarzi said. He adds that the AI is "only as good as the data that is has and it's only as good as how it gets trained."

Those are the things that inform how Intuit develops and uses AI, Goodarzi said. Instead of using AI to find the answers to solve everything, he said Intuit is using it to leverage the resources available including human expertise, in keeping with his belief that AI isn't a job killer. 

This is seen in Intuit's new tool called QuickBooks Live Bookkeeping that uses AI to connect small business owners to experts who can help them with the unique challenges that arise with small businesses — such as managing their cash flow, taking out loans, etc. The platform uses AI to help find answers or connect to the right experts who can help find the answers. 

"In our case, connecting people to experts, we're creating jobs because we are personally connecting people to our customers and they're not constrained by their local environment or their local access," Goodarzi said.  

Goodarzi's view is that AI is here to stay and will accelerate over time, so he wants Intuit to leverage it to the best of its ability to provide benefit to their customers.

Got a tip? Contact this reporter via email at pzaveri@businessinsider.com or Signal at 925-364-4258. You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: How to find water when you're stuck in the desert

• Sebastian Thrun — the CEO of KittyHawk, cofounder of Udacity, and pioneer of Google's first self-driving car — delivered a keynote address at the Abu Dhabi International Petroleum Exhibition & Conference (ADIPEC).
• He spoke about how important artificial intelligence and machine learning will be in shaping the future of the industry.
• Prior to the address, Thrun spoke to Business Insider about the formative moments that have informed his career as a disruptor.
• Click here to read more BI Prime stories.

ABU DHABI — Upon first glance, Sebastian Thrun seems like an odd choice to deliver a keynote address at an oil and gas conference.

He's perhaps best known for founding Google X, the tech giant's secretive research and development facility. It was there that he pioneered the first self-driving car and laid the framework for now-thriving Waymo. He was also the mind behind Google Glass.

Even before those developments, Thrun was already an inductee to the National Academy of Engineering, having received the nod at the ripe age of 39.

He now serves as both CEO of KittyHawk — an electric-aircraft manufacturer — and is the cofounder of Udacity, which offers online courses on such subjects as data science and artificial intelligence.

It's his work in AI that likely secured his invitation to speak at the Abu Dhabi International Petroleum Exhibition & Conference (ADIPEC). After he delivered a rousing opening presentation that played more like a Silicon Valley pitch — a spiel featuring video clips and peppered with quotes from the likes of Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and even Vladimir Putin — Thrun sat down and was asked specifically about the energy industry.

The questions came on the heels of an example he presented during his preamble, where he claimed the forward-thinking application of AI had boosted profits at Royal Dutch Shell by $7 billion. (Note: This exact figure was unable to be confirmed.)

How does he think Shell pulled that off, and how can their success be applied to other firms in the field? 

"It's the intelligence in imaging when you do analyses of potential new sites," Thrun said. "It's the processing of oil. It's the optimiziation of the distribution chain. It's the optimization of the supply chain. It's the repetitive work that's done in the office to make this all happen."

He continued: "None of these singular things does it. But if you have a data science mindset — an AI mindset — then you can chisel every problem using data."

The logic underlying Thrun's response is central to his overall belief around not just energy, but any industry looking to innovate quickly and set itself up for future success. He looks at the world's tech juggernauts as a prime example of this line of thinking.

"When you look at the big tech companies that we all adore: Facebook, Google, Amazon — these companies are massive AI companies," he said. "Everything they do is based on data. And that data thinking gives them a completely new level of scale."

"It's important for companies," he added. "You have to do it or get left behind."

Thrun likes to think big

As evidenced by Thrun's oil-industry comments, he's a big thinker. It's a quality he attributes to a childhood spent rebelling against directions, preferring to carve his own path.

"As a kid, I never wanted to be told what to do," he told Business Insider in an interview before his keynote address. "In fact, if you told me to do one thing, I would do the opposite."

This restlessness was what ultimately led Thrun to leave his position as a tenured professor at Stanford after 19 years to join Google, he said. It was there that he says he learned a new skill: how to take technology and build it at scale.

This breakthrough seems to inform all of Thrun's grand visions. In discussion, he riffs casually about freeing the world of traffic, drastically reducing transportation times through self-driving aircraft, spotting skin cancer using iPhones, curing Alzheimers and obesity, and revolutionizing education as we know it.

For those who find his ideas far-flung, he points to his success pioneering self-driving cars. When Alphabet CEO Larry Page — whom Thrun describes as a friend — asked him to take on the project, he had reservations. Ten engineers and 18 months later, they'd reached a solution.

But he still hasn't won everyone over. Especially not the automakers whose industry he's attempting to upend.

"I don't think the car companies take me seriously right now," he told Business Insider with a grin. "But four or five years ago, when I was working on a self-driving car now known as Waymo, the car companies didn't take me seriously either."

He concluded: "These technologies looked like science fiction for a long time to most of us, and very few of us realized how real they really were. When it sinks in that they're real, then the world changes." 

SEE ALSO: Inside a 'historic day' at the Middle East's biggest oil and gas conference, where all the world's top energy CEOs gathered to sign a deal that could permanently change the industry

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: A big-money investor in juggernauts like Facebook and Netflix breaks down the '3rd wave' firms that are leading the next round of tech disruption

• Harry Shum, the Microsoft executive charged with overseeing the artificial intelligence strategy for the entire company, is leaving after 23 years.
• Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott has already taken over his group and responsibilities. 
• Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently said artificial intelligence would play a key role in the company's future and central to the company's strategy to gain more customers for its important cloud business.
• Nadella said Microsoft is just now starting the "first innings" of artificial intelligence technology.
• Shum was key to Microsoft's efforts to take the research it was doing through research subsidiary Microsoft Research and translate it to actual products Microsoft can sell. Now Microsoft has to do that without him just as the business is starting to come together.
• Shum hasn't revealed his next move, but a Microsoft spokesperson said he will continue to advise Nadella and Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates after he departs.
• Click here for more BI Prime stories

Microsoft is losing a key executive who helped the Redmond-based company turn artificial intelligence research into products just as its AI business is getting off the ground.

Harry Shum, who runs Microsoft's AI and Research group, is leaving in February after 23 years at Microsoft. He has already shifted his group and responsibilities to Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott, which include overseeing the company's AI strategy, research and development on infrastructure, services, and apps, and AI-focused product groups including Bing. 

The news was first reported by ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley, and confirmed by Microsoft to Business Insider.

Shum's departure comes at a time when Microsoft is making big investments in AI. It's one of the technologies Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently said would play a key role in the company's future and central to the company's strategy to gain more customers for its important cloud business. Nadella said Microsoft is starting the "first innings" of artificial intelligence technology.

Shum was key to Microsoft's efforts to take the cutting-edge work it was doing through its more academically-minded subsidiary Microsoft Research and translate it into actual products Microsoft can sell. The AI and Research group he leads was explicitly created for that purpose — and now Microsoft will have to embark on this goal without him.

Shum hasn't revealed his next move, but a Microsoft spokesperson said he will continue to advise Nadella and Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates after he departs.

"Harry has had a profound impact on Microsoft," Nadella said in a prepared statement. "His contributions in the fields of computer science and AI leave a legacy and a strong foundation for future innovation."

Shum's legacy

Shum joined Microsoft Research in 1996 as a researcher at the company's Redmond headquarters. He moved to Beijing in 1998 to help start what is now Microsoft Research Asia and worked his way up to managing director and distinguished engineer. He later led product development on the Bing search engine from 2007 to 2013.

Microsoft formed the AI and Research group in September 2016 by combining several teams, including Bing, the Cortana virtual assistant, and its robotics efforts. The idea was to place a greater emphasis on turning AI research into AI products, with Shum at the helm. 

Microsoft doubled down once again on that effort last year when it created new groups dedicated to AI products,  taking guidance from Shum, such as the AI Cognitive Services and Platform focused on AI for Microsoft's Azure cloud business and the AI Perception and Mixed Reality group, which helps tie Azure together with cutting-edge computer vision and augmented reality technology like Microsoft's own HoloLens 2 goggles.

One result was the Azure AI platform, helping developers use Microsoft's artificial intelligence tech in their own cloud computing apps. The platform now has 20,000 customers, and more than 85% of Fortune 100 companies have used Azure AI in the past 12 months, according to the company.

Microsoft's new AI leader

Scott has been Microsoft's chief technology officer since 2017, when he came over from LinkedIn, where he had been the senior vice president of engineering and operations.

In his capacity as CTO, Scott largely worked as a futurist, helping the company navigate industry trends and identify new opportunities. 

Research and development was previously outside his purview, but Scott worked on the company's artificial intelligence efforts through recruiting engineering leadership and holding events like AI 365, a forum to discuss artificial intelligence.

Last year, Scott shared his predictions for the major technology trends to come in an interview with Business Insider, including that the cheap, powerful silicon processors coming in the next five to eight years will lead to every device getting a microprocessor capable of running advanced artificial intelligence.

AI is the "perhaps the second-most important thing" Microsoft is doing, Scott said — behind its flagship businesses like Windows, Office, and Azure.

What's at stake

Artificial intelligence has been a major emphasis for Microsoft in the past few years. Nadella even changed the company's vision statement in 2017 to include AI: "We believe a new technology paradigm is emerging that manifests itself through an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge where computing is more distributed, AI drives insights and acts on the user's behalf, and user experiences span devices with a user's available data and information."

The company's approach is to find ways to simplify AI so that any company can use it, and it recently released new features for its Azure AI platform towards this end. Experts say the company that figures out how to sell practical applications for AI could have an advantage in the fierce competition for cloud computing customers.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is the No. 2 cloud provider behind Amazon Web Services, but it's made some significant gains, including recently winning a $10 billion Pentagon cloud computing contract over AWS. 

Azure remains crucial important to Microsoft's business, and its future growth. Microsoft's overall commercial cloud business, in which it also counts Microsoft Azure, Office 365 and other cloud services, reached $11.6 billion in sales in the company's most recent quarter, up 36 percent year over year.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: A 45-year-long study discovered trends in successful hyper-intelligent children

• The Oculus executive John Carmack is leaving his post as chief technology officer to work on artificial intelligence.
• The legendary game programmer is stepping away from his position at the top of Facebook's virtual-reality unit, though he says he will remain a "consulting CTO."
• Carmack will now focus his time on working on artificial general intelligence, a branch of AI focusing on building flexible, human-like intelligence with machines.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

The high-level Facebook executive and legendary game programmer John Carmack is stepping away from his role as chief technology officer at Facebook's virtual-reality unit, Oculus, to focus on artificial-intelligence research.

In a post on Facebook on Wednesday, Carmack announced that he was transitioning to a "consulting CTO" role and would work on artificial general intelligence, a branch of AI research focusing on building flexible, human-like intelligence.

"I think it is possible, enormously valuable, and that I have a non-negligible chance of making a difference there, so by a Pascal's Mugging sort of logic, I should be working on it," he wrote. "For the time being at least, I am going to be going about it 'Victorian Gentleman Scientist' style, pursuing my inquiries from home, and drafting my son into the work."

A Facebook representative stressed that Carmack would remain at Facebook, albeit in this new role. There are no plans to hire a new CTO for Oculus, the person said.

Carmack's departure represents the latest exit or transition by a respected leader at a company acquired by Facebook. Over the past few years, the founders and heads of businesses including WhatsApp, Instagram, and Oculus have steadily left Facebook as their products have been more closely integrated into the social-media giant; Carmack wasn't a founder of Oculus, but he joined it early in its life, before Facebook acquired it for $2 billion in 2014, and remained at the helm as CTO since then.

The 49-year-old technology exec is a legend in the video game industry, cofounding Id Software, the studio responsible for megahits like "Doom," before joining Facebook.

Here's Carmack's full goodbye post on Facebook:

Starting this week, I'm moving to a "Consulting CTO" position with Oculus.

I will still have a voice in the development work, but it will only be consuming a modest slice of my time.

As for what I am going to be doing with the rest of my time: When I think back over everything I have done across games, aerospace, and VR, I have always felt that I had at least a vague "line of sight" to the solutions, even if they were unconventional or unproven. I have sometimes wondered how I would fare with a problem where the solution really isn't in sight. I decided that I should give it a try before I get too old.

I'm going to work on artificial general intelligence (AGI).

I think it is possible, enormously valuable, and that I have a non-negligible chance of making a difference there, so by a Pascal's Mugging sort of logic, I should be working on it.

For the time being at least, I am going to be going about it "Victorian Gentleman Scientist" style, pursuing my inquiries from home, and drafting my son into the work.

Runner up for next project was cost effective nuclear fission reactors, which wouldn't have been as suitable for that style of work.

Do you work at Oculus or Facebook? Contact this reporter via encrypted messaging app Signal at +1 (650) 636-6268 using a non-work phone, email at rprice@businessinsider.com, Telegram or WeChat at robaeprice, or Twitter DM at @robaeprice. (PR pitches by email only, please.)

• Read more:
• Instagram's lax privacy practices let a trusted partner track millions of users' physical locations, secretly save their stories, and flout its rules
• Mark Zuckerberg's personal security chief accused of sexual harassment and making racist remarks about Priscilla Chan by 2 former staffers
• Facebook says it 'unintentionally uploaded' 1.5 million people's email contacts without their consent
• Years of Mark Zuckerberg's old Facebook posts have vanished. The company says it 'mistakenly deleted' them.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Inside the US government's top-secret bioweapons lab

• Thanks to leaps and bounds in the field of artificial intelligence in the past decade, robots are increasingly beating humans at our own games.
• AI-powered programs have proven their prowess at competitive games and academic tests alike throughout the past 10 years.
• Many advances in AI can't be quantified with competitions or challenges, but robots' victories at games ranging from Jeopardy to Dota show how far AI has come.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

When IBM's Deep Blue chess machine defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997, the world responded with surprise and angst at how far computers had come: "Be Afraid," read a Weekly Standard headline reacting to the news.

Artificial intelligence has since made advancements that were unthinkable just 20 years ago — in the past decade alone, robots have achieved dominance over humans in games far more complex than chess.

While most of those advances can't be quantified with milestones like chess victories, programmers have continued the tradition of building machines designed to outsmart humans at our own games.

Here's a comprehensive list of the competitions, games, and challenges that robots beat humans at in the past decade.

SEE ALSO: The 13 biggest tech companies that bombed, died, or disappeared in the 2010s

2011: IBM's Watson beats two former champions to win Jeopardy

Watson defeated 74-time Jeopardy winner Ken Jennings and 20-time winner Brad Rutter after a three-day contest, showcasing the strength of IBM's supercomputer.

2014: Facebook's DeepFace facial recognition algorithm achieves an accuracy rate of 97%, rivaling the rate of humans

Facial recognition technology has only become more sophisticated since Facebook achieved that milestone in 2014. However, some research has questioned whether human facial recognition can accurately be compared to AI facial recognition.

2015: Google DeepMind's AlphaGo defeats Go champions in Korea and Europe

In the years following AlphaGo's 2015 victories, it went on to defeat several other international champions, and by 2017 it was able to win 60 rounds of Go back-to-back.

2016: Microsoft speech recognition AI can transcribe audio with fewer mistakes than humans

Microsoft said that its software achieved an error rate of 0.4%, compared to the human error rate of 5.9%.

2017: Libratus, an AI bot, defeats four of the world's leading poker players in a 20-day tournament

Unlike Chess or Go, poker is an imperfect information game, meaning players have to guess each others' hands — making Libratus' victory all the more impressive.

2017: An OpenAI bot defeats a human esports player at the multiplayer online battle arena game Dota 2

The bot, developed by OpenAI, has repeatedly beaten the world's top Dota 2 players.

2017: An AI system developed by researchers at Northwestern is able to beat 75 percent of Americans at a visual intelligence test

The program can solve logic games simply by looking at them — while most vision-based AI at the time focused on recognition, this one takes an extra step with visual reasoning.

2018: Alibaba's AI outscores humans in a Stanford University reading comprehension test

After answering 10,000 reading comprehension questions, Alibaba's AI scored 82.44, just above the 82.304 score achieved by humans.

• For the past 10-plus years, Apple has made billions of dollars by manufacturing and selling the iPhone.
• But what's next, after the iPhone? That's the big question.
• Apple has a few major projects in the works, from a set of smart glasses to self-driving car technology to — yes — more iPhones.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Apple dominated the last decade in tech with the ubiquitous iPhone, and it's gearing up for the next 10 years with a variety of projects.

Notably, at least one of those projects is intended to outright replace the iPhone. 

From self-driving cars to smart glasses to taking on Netflix, these are Apple's plans for continued domination in the decade to come.

SEE ALSO: Apple reportedly revealed the devices it expects to replace the iPhone during a secret employee meeting in October

1. The iPhone replacement: Apple's smart glasses.

Apple's looking to replace the iPhone "in roughly a decade," according to a new report in The Information.

But what comes after the iPhone?

Some version of smart glasses, the first pair of which could arrive as soon as 2022, the report said. A "sleeker" pair is scheduled to arrive in 2023 — and Apple's senior managers see the headsets replacing the iPhone "in roughly a decade."

Neither product has been announced by Apple, but the two headsets were reportedly detailed to a packed room of employees in a secret October meeting at Apple's headquarters in Cupertino, California.

According to people who attended the meeting cited in The Information's report, Apple detailed the two devices as such:

• The first device, expected in 2022, is said to resemble the Oculus Quest virtual-reality headset, with a high-resolution display, cameras mounted on the outside, and the ability to map its surroundings.
• The second device, expected in 2023, is more akin to sunglasses, with a thick frame to house a battery and processors. These glasses are intended for all-day use and are a step closer to Apple's eventual goal of releasing a device that replaces the iPhone.

Previous reports about Apple's smart-glasses project have pointed to a release as soon as 2020. Apple has reportedly been working on some form of so-called augmented-reality eyewear since at least 2015.

2. Services galore, and maybe even a bundling of those services.

First it was Apple Music, and then it was Apple News Plus, and Apple Arcade, and, most recently, Apple TV Plus.

In the last few years, Apple has rapidly evolved into a major player in a subscription services market dominated by the likes of Netflix and Spotify. But the company's next big move in that space may be a contraction of sorts: Apple is considering a subscription bundle that would include Apple Music, Apple TV Plus, and Apple News Plus, according to a report from Bloomberg's Gerry Smith and Mark Gurman.

And that new bundle could arrive as soon as next year, in 2020, according to the report. The bundle of services that is said to be coming next year doesn't include Apple Arcade, the video game subscription service Apple launched in September.

Starting with Apple Music in 2015, Apple has pushed hard into digital subscription services across the last several years. In 2019 in particular, Apple has launched three major new subscription services: Apple News Plus, Apple TV Plus, and Apple Arcade.

And Apple is showing no signs of slowing down in the coming years — especially as competition from the likes of Disney, Netflix, HBO, and more continues to heat up.

3. Self-driving cars, anyone?

Even the secret codename for Apple's self-driving car efforts is grandiose: "Project Titan" is what it's known as internally.

The company has been working on self-driving car tech for five years at this point — the project has thousands of employees, and has even had layoffs along the way.

Apple hasn't officially unveiled Project Titan, but the company has acknowledged that such efforts are underway. "We continue to believe there is a huge opportunity with autonomous systems, that Apple has unique capabilities to contribute, and that this is the most ambitious machine learning project ever,"the company said in a statement to CNBC back in January, when it moved hundreds of employees to other projects.

So, uh, what is the mysterious project?

At one point, it was said to be an entire car — an Apple car! — with self-driving technology. In the years since, Project Titan has reportedly evolved into a software-focused project.

4. The fastest iPhone yet, with 5G speeds, could be coming as soon as 2020.

It's true: Apple will continue to make the iPhone for years to come, regardless of the various projects in the works.

2020 is no exception, with analysts and media expecting the iPhone 12 — next year's iPhone — to have 5G connectivity.

5G is the next major step for smartphone data after 4G LTE, the current standard. In short, 5G will bring faster-than-ever speeds to smartphone users. But the jump from current speeds to 5G will be gradual, and only phones with hardware that works with 5G networks will be able to take advantage of the speed increase.

According to several reports thus far, Apple's next iPhone will have hardware built-in that enables it to work on 5G networks. Next year's iPhones are also expected to feature better cameras and a new form of Touch ID underneath the glass screen — Apple holds its iPhone reveal event each year in September, so we're unlikely to learn more about the next iPhone until many, many months from now.

• Salesforce is doubling down on its goal of helping businesses get a "360 degree view" of their customers with new announcements at its annual Dreamforce mega-conference in San Francisco. 
• The key announcement is a new tool called Customer 360 Data Manager.
• The tool will make it easy for users to create a single ID to identify their customers across all of their devices, and across the sales, service, and marketing departments. 
• Read more on the Business Insider homepage.

Salesforce is doubling down on its goal of helping businesses get a "360 degree view" of their customers with new products announced today, ahead of its Dreamforce Conference in San Francisco. 

For Salesforce, having a "360 degree view" means being able to track customer's actions, preferences and habits across devices. It's something Salesforce co-CEO Keith Block has called the company's "fourth act," and a "Holy Grail" for its customers.

"The underlying vision or north star we're always looking for at Salesforce is customer centricity, so we build all of our applications to help businesses be more connected to their customers. So ultimately that's what we're trying to solve for," Patrick Stokes, EVP of platform shared services at Salesforce, told Business Insider.

As part of this strategy, Salesforce will introduce at Dreamforce a new tool, called Customer 360 Data Manager, that will make it easy for users to create a single ID to identify their customers across all of their devices, and across the sales, service, and marketing departments. 

The problem that it's trying to solve, Salesforce says, is that poor customer service comes when a support agent doesn't know everything about the person on the other end of the phone or standing at the help desk. Essentially, Stokes said, Salesforce wants to give its customers a single place to put everything they know about their own customers — no matter where that information came from.

Beyond customer service, that single ID tool is supported by another new tool called Customer 360 Audiences, which is aimed to help businesses better market to their customers. This tool will allow businesses to use the profile of a customer to inform how the company markets to them through emails, online advertisements, and other channels.

Salesforce is also rolling in pre-existing tools into what it now calls the Customer 360 Truth group, including a tool that lets customers log in to sites using that single ID, and another that helps keep data in compliance with regulations like Europe's GDPR. 

New AI improvements

Artificial intelligence is also playing a role in Salesforce's updates at Dreamforce. Salesforce's Service Cloud, its cloud software for customer service agents, now uses AI to transcribe a phone call in real-time, helping eliminate the need for a caller to repeat themselves. The offering is called Service Cloud Voice.

Another new update is also voice-related: Salesforce will provide developers with the tools to build voice-powered software for Alexa and other digital assistants that can also interface with the data on its platform.

Salesforce's Einstein AI will also be able to recommend solutions to customer support agents as a call goes on.

It's all part of the company's long term goal of using AI to help improve the customer relationship experience. 

"Everything about Salesforce from when we started 20 years ago, it was CRM, customer relationship management...flash forward 20 years, it's about being number one in customer relationship management and leveraging the power of the latest innovative technologies to drive better customer relationships," Stephanie Buscemi, Salesforce CMO, told Business Insider in a recent interview.

Got a tip? Contact this reporter via email at pzaveri@businessinsider.com or Signal at 925-364-4258. You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: People are still debating the pink or grey sneaker, 2 years after it went viral. Here's the real color explained.

• White-collar, college-educated workers in business, tech, and finance are at greatest risk of having artificial intelligence impact their jobs, according to a new study from Brookings. 
• The report raises questions on how profitable or employable STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) college graduates will be in the future.
• STEM grads currently have higher median household incomes and lower unemployment rates compared to the general graduate population.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Majoring in engineering might not guarantee you a lofty job much longer.

A new study from Brookings found that workers with bachelor's and graduate degrees are five and four times more likely, respectively, to get impacted by AI than people with just a high school degree. Brookings can't predict whether the impact would mean job loss, but the technology will likely replace some job functions.

In addition to manufacturers, white-collar workers in business, finance, and tech industries face greater career consequences of AI impact when the technology becomes more advanced. These findings differ from other reports that say low-income workers will be the ones getting replaced by AI.

Mark Muro, a senior fellow at Brookings and lead author on the study, told Business Insider that the report suggests a college degree won't give graduates a "pass" on avoiding AI's potentially negative impact on jobs. STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) graduates, who currently have lower unemployment than general grads, might not have as much job security when AI becomes more advanced. 

"I think this raises questions about whether STEM analysis, STEM education, or college degrees per se, offer a way to completely avoid these kinds of technology transitions at work," Muro said in an interview. "I think this throws attention on what we educate for and what we train for."

Unlike other surveys, Brookings analyzed the "exposure," or how much of the job will get replaced or supplemented by AI, by comparing job descriptions to patents that have been filed for the technology. Other reports tend to be more subjective by using expert commentary, Muro said.

The study comes at a time when college degrees are pricier than ever. As Business Insider's Hillary Hoffower reported, the cost of undergraduate degrees rose by 213% for public schools and 129% for private schools, adjusting for inflation.

Plus, the total amount of student loans in the US has topped $1 trillion. Hoffower has also reported that nearly half of college grads with debt don't think their college degree helped them earn more money.

The report may shock some STEM graduates who for years have been practically guaranteed high-paying work after graduation. All but two of the 20 highest-paying college majors are in some kind of engineering occupation, and the STEM college majors have higher median incomes and lower unemployment rates compared to the general graduate population. 

Muro said exposure to AI does not necessarily mean job loss, and AI might just supplement work. But he said that AI exposure will likely lower wages and lead to job replacement if human workers can no longer bring "extra value" that AI can't.

Jobs that AI won't have as much impact on include relatively low-paying work in food preparation and education. The reason might be because these jobs require interpersonal skills that are difficult for machines to replicate. For instance, there are already machines that can flip burgers, yet fast food workers are cheaper and better at it so companies haven't invested much in the tech, wrote Ellen Ruppel Shell in her book, "The Job: Work and Its Future in a Time of Radical Change."

"It may be that college education, or educational training in general, should be [focused] on things like interpersonal relations and judgement ethical decision making," Muro said. "A college degree won't give someone a pass on dealing with these transitions but it also may be useful if it allows for people to be better equipped to do things that machines can't."

• Read more:
• Apple, Google, and Netflix don't require employees to have 4-year degrees, and this could soon become an industry norm
• Blue-collar jobs like plumbing pay $90,000 without a college degree, and it's driving more workers to trade school
• The 20 most popular jobs of 2019
• 3 million older Americans can't find high-paying jobs, and it has nothing to do with skills. Here's the one barrier they face that no one's addressing.

SEE ALSO: 20 high-paying jobs you can get with just an associate degree

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Taylor Swift is the world's highest-paid celebrity. Here's how she makes and spends her $360 million.

• Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates appeared onstage for Bloomberg's New Economy Forum in Beijing on Thursday, and spoke out against protectionism in artificial intelligence research. 
• The US and China have dominated in AI research, but rising political tensions have slowed collaboration between the two countries and raised concerns of national security. 
• But Gates said separating the sectors was impractical, and 'just doesn't work.'
• He also said sharing research was key for attracting talent: many Microsoft employees stayed at the company because it regularly publishes their research, he said. 
• Gates is no stranger to wading into controversial topics. At the New York Times DealBook conference in early November, he apologized for his ties with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and questioned whether Sen. Elizabeth Warren would be willing to even hear his concerns about her proposed wealth tax. 
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

As tensions rise between the US and China, there's been some chatter of an AI arms race that would see each country scrambling to get and retain some kind of advantage in the field.

But Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, who spoke at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Beijing on Thursday, says he has some difficulty understanding how separating or limiting the sharing of scientific research would even work. 

"You can't, you know, carry around little notes to each other saying don't give this to someone because their grandmother is Chinese," he said. "It doesn't work." 

Gates said that the US has long benefitted from openly sharing scientific research, and that it remains a huge advantage, especially within the field of artificial intelligence. In his view, there's no going back from that approach.

"AI is very hard to put back in the bottle and whoever has the open system will so vastly get ahead," Gates said. "You can completely ignore whoever tries to close their system." 

Gates said he visited Microsoft's AI research lab in Beijing, and pointed out that sharing research was one of the reasons that its employees came to work at Microsoft in the first place.  

"We gladly pay their salaries, but if we didn't have that publishing approach, those people would go and work somewhere else," Gates said. 

Of note is that Gates' remarks at the Bloomberg conference passed with less controversy than his recent appearance at the New York Times DealBook conference in early November.

On stage at that event, the billionaire philanthropist blamed an antitrust lawsuit for causing Microsoft's Windows Phone to lose out to Google's Android, apologized for his association with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and questioned whether presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) would be willing to hear his concerns about her proposed wealth tax. Warren quickly responded that she would be happy to sit down with Gates and explain the tax.  

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Behind the scenes with Shepard Smith — the Fox News star who just announced his resignation from the network

• Only a small fraction of the garbage the world produces each year gets recycled— about 16%— and that number has gotten even smaller in the past year.
• About one-fourth of items that are put in recycling bins can't be recycled at all, including greasy pizza boxes.
• Recycling takes up so much resources to sort and process, US cities resort to burning or trashing recyclable items to save money.
• Artificial intelligence companies are enlisting robots to make recycling sustainable, by sorting through trash themselves.
• Watch the video above, part of the AI.Revolution series, to learn more.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Humans have enlisted nearly 100 AI-powered robots in North American to come to the rescue for something humans are terrible at: recycling.

Even when we try to do it right, we're often making things worse; About one out of every four of the things people throw into the recycling bin aren't recyclable at all.

All those misplaced greasy pizza boxes (not recyclable) and clamshell containers tossed in with the plastics, have imperiled an industry that was never really that effective in the first place. 

Only a small fraction of the over 2.1 billion tons of the garbage the world produces each year gets recycled — about 16%.

And even that small sliver has gotten smaller over the past year.

Since China no longer processes other countries' waste, the US needs to find an alternative to burning its trash

For decades, the US sold more than half of its recyclables to China — mostly plastics to be melted into pellets, the raw material for making more plastic.

But in March of 2018, China said, "No More."

"They started shipping more and more stuff to China, often contaminated dirty plastics or mixed too many mixed goods," said Kate O'Neill, a UC Berkeley professor and author of "Waste."

Around a quarter of the shipments China received had to be hand-processed, buried in landfills, or incinerated. 

So the Chinese government declared that bales could contain only up to half a percent of things that contaminated them, like food wrappers or a dirty jar of peanut butter. US consumers and recycling centers couldn't keep up.

"I think people in the wealthy countries had gotten complacent, never bothering to build more recycling facilities domestically," O'Neill added. 

Installing artificial intelligence in robots to sort through trash may be a sustainable solution

Today, a handful of start-ups are testing out new technology to make recycling sustainable.

AMP Robotics is an artificial intelligence and robotics company that aims to change the way we recycle. 

Founder of AMP Robotics, Matanya Horowitz said "the situation with the Chinese export markets have actually been good for [the company]."

AMP Robotics is rolling out its latest model: a "Cortex Robot" that uses optical sensors to take in what rolls by, and a "brain" to figure out what his "hands" should do with something — even if it looks different to anything he's seen before.

"A lot of these recycling facilities are structured with the primary task of basically dealing with contamination that's not supposed to be there," said Horotwiz. ""What we see is a lot of recycling facilities are investing in automation to help improve their operations."

At least four companies are rolling out similar models, in the hopes of turning a profit from the US' growing piles of hard-to-sort recyclables. 

And investors are taking notice. In November 2019, AMP Robotics announced a $16 million Series A investment from Sequoia Capital.

China is helping its own citizens get better at recycling

But what about helping humans get better at choosing what to put in their recycling bins in the first place?

New policies in Shanghai are one of the first steps in China's push to solve its waste problems.

This past summer, citizens will face fines and what are called "social penalties" if they don't sort things properly.

One trash sorting volunteer said, Shanghai started the test run on June 24. "It was very hard for us at the beginning. Everyone was busy, people didn't know how to sort," the volunteer — who requested to be unidentified — said.

"At first we had some hard times," said Shanghai citizen Zhaoju Zhang. "The most difficult part was how to differentiate between dry and wet trash. It was so complicated that we all got confused."

Almost immediately, hundreds of AI-enabled apps sprouted up in order to assist everyday sorting.

"If it's something that is confusing whether it's dry or wet trash, we can just scan the item and get the answer,"  Zhang said.

But not everyone has access to AI to help parse the new rules, and many complain that complying is tough, and punishments are too harsh. 

Kate O'Neill said the new laws are having a "massive cultural impact" and there are "some concerns about how draconian it is, but it's too early to really tell the results. But it certainly has seems to be a massive culture shift."

This kind of cultural shift in how we throw things away would be challenging in the US, where the average person produces twice as much trash as a Chinese citizen. 

But experts warn that rethinking the way we deal with garbage is essential, and AI technology offers a promising way forward.

It's even possible for it to identify who created a piece of trash in the first place.

Horowitz explained that robots are able to learn the features of materials. They are able to sparse whether a material is cloudy or opaque. AI robots may even be able to identify symbols of specific brands. All of these abilities help the robots like Max narrow down the source of contamination and what to do with it.

Last year, over 250 companies signed a MacArthur Foundation agreement pledging that 100% of plastic packaging will be easily and safely reused, recycled, or composted by 2025. 

CEO of SC Johnson, Fisk Johnson, said in an interview, "We're a family company, and we have a very long-term view, and business has to be part of the solution."

Whether or not they make good on this pledge, AI will be quietly watching, and gathering data on the packaging these brands continue to use.

SEE ALSO: 14 things you didn't know were recyclable

SEE ALSO: China is refusing to take 'foreign garbage' from the US, so these 6 cities are burning or throwing away your recycling

Join the conversation about this story »

• Facebook is bulking up its team working to build an AI assistant to rival Amazon's Alexa and Apple's Siri.
• The company is hiring for a number of technical roles as it attempts to build out its expertise in the area.
• Facebook's previous attempt to build an AI assistant, M, never reached the point of mainstream adoption.
• Click here for more BI Prime stories.

Facebook is quietly bulking up its team working to develop an artificial-intelligence assistant that could challenge Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, and the Google Assistant.

The Silicon Valley social-networking giant has a bevy of open job postings on its website for its "Conversational AI" group in a bid to attract technical talent with expertise in machine language, natural language understanding, and other fields necessary to build an advanced AI chatbot.

The listings indicate that Facebook is pushing ahead with its plans to enter the space and take on its far-better-established rivals, even after its previous attempts to build an AI assistant have failed to take off. The postings also offer a new window into what the $566 billion company is envisioning. 

"The Conversational AI group built M, Messenger's in-thread assistant that proactively recommends stickers, polls, restaurants, movie tickets and so much more to more than 1.3 billion people that use Facebook Messenger every month," one job listing reads. "This journey is only 1% finished, and assistant features within Messenger today represent only initial steps in terms of what we expect a truly social assistant to be able to do in the years ahead."

A word on M

Facebook first dipped a toe into the world of AI assistants with M — a chatbot that lived inside Messenger and that acted almost like a concierge. It wasn't purely AI-powered however and relied on humans behind the scenes to help with queries. It never saw a wide-scale launch and, instead, was available to only a small pool of around 2,000 people.

In January 2018, it was shuttered, and M morphed into a feature that lived inside users' Messenger conversations to suggest stickers, recommendations, and so on — a far cry from the more sophisticated voice-activated AI assistants from Amazon, Google, and other rivals.

When Facebook launched its Portal video-calling device in October 2018, it shipped with Amazon's Alexa built in, rather than an in-house AI assistant — but its existence hinted that it was a space in which Facebook was still interested.

Then in April, CNBC reported that Facebook had been developing an unannounced voice assistant since early 2018. Facebook subsequently confirmed its interest in the space, saying in a short statement to the press: "We are working to develop voice and AI assistant technologies that may work across our family of AR/VR products including Portal, Oculus, and future products."

More than six months later, the company is still working away. It is hiring a research scientist with a "strong background in developing Dialog systems, a strong knowledge of ML, NLP and neural networks,"a machine-learning engineer, and a software-engineering manager, all to work in the conversational AI group. "We are developing technologies to help connect people to what matters most by recognizing and fulfilling their intent in a natural way," one listing reads.

The new hires will join an array of workers at Facebook already building the "Facebook Assistant," including product designers, data-operations linguists, machine-learning engineers, voice-user-interface designers, and product marketers, according to LinkedIn profiles. The effort is being led at Facebook by Ira Snyder, who was previously the general manager of research at Facebook Reality Labs, its augmented-reality and virtual-reality research hub.

The company's rival products have already been on the market for years, and it may face an uphill battle to break into the market.

Facebook declined to comment on this story.

Do you work at Facebook? Contact this reporter via encrypted messaging app Signal at +1 (650) 636-6268 using a nonwork phone, email at rprice@businessinsider.com, Telegram or WeChat at robaeprice, or Twitter DM at @robaeprice. (PR pitches by email only, please.)

Read more:

• Instagram's lax privacy practices let a trusted partner track millions of users' physical locations, secretly save their stories, and flout its rules 
• Mark Zuckerberg's personal security chief accused of sexual harassment and making racist remarks about Priscilla Chan by 2 former staffers
• Facebook says it 'unintentionally uploaded' 1.5 million people's email contacts without their consent
• Years of Mark Zuckerberg's old Facebook posts have vanished. The company says it 'mistakenly deleted' them.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: How autopilot on an airplane works

• The biggest improvement coming to Google's search engine in the next 10 years is likely to be an ability to understand context and the intention behind your query, said Daniel M. Russell, a senior research scientist who has been with Google for 14 years.
• That's important for Google, considering most people type roughly two words when performing a search, which doesn't give the search engine much context to work with.
• Google recently took another step in this direction by applying a natural-language-processing model to its search tool that enables it to understand the context of a word by looking at the words that surround it in a phrase or sentence.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Think about what it was like to do a Google search 10 years ago, in 2009.

It probably would have involved opening your laptop or booting up your desktop computer, typing in a few keywords, and hitting the search button. That may not sound very different from how you would look up the answer to a question through Google today, but chances are what happens after you hit that "search" button has changed drastically.

What was once a simple list of blue links has evolved into a richer stream of information that includes all types of content, from sports scores to facts about prominent public figures and more.

Over the next 10 years, the biggest change to Google will be less about how the information is presented and more about Google's process of getting the answers you're looking for.

In other words, Google is going to get much better at understanding what you're hoping to find when you enter a search query, according to a Google employee of 14 years.

"The general direction, I think, is going to be a deeper analysis of language," Daniel M. Russell, a senior research scientist for search quality and user happiness at Google, recently told Business Insider when asked how search would change over the next decade.

"Basically, we're going to get better at understanding the contents of webpages, and we're going to get better at understanding what you mean in your query," Russell said.

Google is already taking important steps in this direction. One of the biggest upgrades to Google in recent months, for example, has been the application of the company's BERT technology to search results.

BERT, which stands for "bidirectional encoder representations from transformers," is a natural-language-processing technique that enables Google to better understand the context of a word by looking at the words that come before and after it. That makes it easier for the search engine to understand the reason behind your search so that it can pull up the desired answer.

Such improvements are increasingly important for Google, considering the average length of a search query is about two words. That could present a challenge for Google, since it doesn't have very much context to work with.

For example, if you type in the word "jaguar," you could be looking for the animal, the car, or the Mac operating system from 2002. But if you add another search term like "South America," Google understands you're probably looking for more information about the animal.

Google's goal for search in the long run is to get even better at making those kinds of connections, even with shorter queries.

"We're getting very good at guessing," Russell said. "But we're guessing."

SEE ALSO: The wireless industry is on the brink of a huge shift that's going to change how we use our smartphones — here are 4 improvements 5G will bring to your phone

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Apple just revealed its AirPods Pro for $249, which feature noise cancellation. Here's everything that was wrong with the $159 pair of the wireless headphones.