The resounding win by a Google artificial intelligence (AI) programme over a champion in the complex board game Go this month was a statement — not so much to professional game players as to Google’s competitors.
Many of the tech industry’s biggest companies are jockeying to become the go-to company for AI. In the industry’s lingo, the companies are engaged in a “platform war.” If true believers in AI are correct that this long-promised technology is ready for the mainstream, the company that controls AI could steer the tech industry for years to come.
“Whoever wins this race will dominate the next stage of the information age,” said Pedro Domingos, a machine learning specialist. In this fight — no doubt in its early stages — the big tech companies are engaged in tit-for-tat publicity stunts, circling the same starups that could provide the technology pieces they are missing and, perhaps most important, trying to hire the same brains.
At the University of Toronto, IBM pursued a startup called Ross Intelligence that makes a smart legal assistant, and extended a free offer to use its AI software, called Watson. 
For years, tech companies have used man-versus-machine competitions to show they are making progress on AI. In 1997, an IBM computer beat the chess champion Garry Kasparov. Five years ago, IBM went even further when its Watson system won a three-day match on the television trivia show “Jeopardy!” Today, Watson is the centerpiece of IBM’s AI efforts. Now, Google’s AI programme is drawing additional attention and pointing to a consolidation among tech’s biggest companies.
By 2020, the market for machine learning applications will reach $40 billion. And 60 per cent of those applications will run on the platform software of four firms — Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft.
In January, before the Google software’s latest Go victory, the scientific journal Nature published an article describing how the program had beaten a European Go champion in five consecutive matches, overshadowing an effort by another tech giant, Facebook, to promote its own powerful Go-playing AI software. Google’s software went on to beat the Go grandmaster Lee Se-dol 4-1 in South Korea this month.
IBM is making the broadest entry into AI. Its Watson unit is both a software and a services business, with technology tailored to specific industries. More than 80,000 developers have downloaded and tried out the software, and the Watson division has 500 industry partners, including big companies and start-ups.
Intelligent software applications will become commonplace, said Jeff Dean, a computer scientist who oversees Google’s AI development. “And machine learning will touch every industry.”
Source: Indiatimes
