AI in 2018: Google seeks to turn early focus on AI into cash

This straightforward order to display pictures of delicious fried confections, spoken into a Google Pixel 2 smartphone with the Google Assistant, is the type of command that users have been executing in Alphabet Inc.'s GOOGL, 1.71% GOOG, 1.64% search engine for years. Behind the scenes, however, the response to this type of query now leverages an enormous amount of machine-learning technology that Google has spent years and billions of dollars developing, in hopes of being a leader in artificial intelligence. For that command to function, software produced by Alphabet-owned Google needed to deploy image content analysis systems, voice recognition and a host of other technologies that revolve around machine learning and AI, mostly pumped through high-tech data centers the company has built. It also decided to make the hardware that runs it, with an eye on pushing the abilities of its services to new places in 2018 and beyond. Since 2013, Alphabet has ramped up its infrastructure spending, pouring $57.36 billion into capital expenditures--roughly $10 billion a year.