This Is How Google (And Its Advertisers) Will Really Get Inside Your Head

But lately, it has been aiming much more directly at building HAL, or what's sometimes called the Google Brain. As I wrote in a recent article, a fast-emerging branch of artificial intelligence called deep learning is helping Google and other companies and researchers produce significant advances in machines that at least approach the way we think. It won't be long--for better or worse--before their work also has a profound impact on marketing and advertising as well. Deep-learning software tries to emulate, albeit in a still primitive way, the activity in layers of neurons in the neocortex, the part of the human brain where thinking occurs. The software, part of artificial neural networks that simulate the neocortex's large array of neurons, learns quite literally to recognize patterns in digital representations of sounds, images, and other data.