AI Apocalypse? AI Plans of Google, Microsoft, and Facebook May Overwhelm Humanity

Latest developments surrounding Google, Microsoft and Facebook point toward massive plans of enhancing AI operations. While these have their benefits, will this eventually begin the rise of AI overlords?

Deep learning systems are becoming a growing trend in some of the world's largest tech companies. This allows AI systems to be able to "see" and learn for themselves depending on how they are programmed. These are new technologies alongside cloud computing and even speech recognition, among others. However, According to Wired, it appears a lot of companies are being re-oriented toward focusing on AI.

For instance, Google's cloud computing operations now aim to provide services that companies could use to make their own AI. Facebook and Twitter appear to already have groups focused on creating their own brand of AI systems, and Microsoft is already gearing toward more intensive operations of AI creation and research. 

However, these are not simply window dressing. Oren Etzioni, CEO of nonprofit Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, said this is not just for show, but in fact, AI is on its way to revolutionize systems.

For instance, Fei-Fei Li's group in Google will try to solidify Google's position in this "AI war" by challenging Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM in its "cloud computing race." This means applications for tasks such as image and speech recognition, natural language understanding and machine-driven translation will focus more on being "more human" than before. 

Microsoft is already providing services for clients to build their own chatbots, and its new Shum team will have more than 5,000 scientists and engineers focused on building new AI-based products. This means we may be able to see new AI integration in the likes of Bing and Cortana. 

Meanwhile, Google, Facebook, and Twitter already have AI-centric teams to boost services such as facial and speech recognition. They even have teams looking for bugs and malwares through machine learning. Facebook will have its own Applied Machine Learning Group that pushes for AI to be applied in all of its products. Twitter's Cortex will serve a similar function, albeit in its own social media platform.

However, the advances in deep neural networking and AI meant there has to be new workplace mechanics to be in play as well. This means companies may have to retrain employees in the new ways of how to manage their new workload. For instance, Facebook now offers machine learning instruction to all engineers inside the company and a formal program that enables employees to be full-time AI researchers.