Google's Big Bet on AI Is Crucial for Its Future

At first, there was a text box. You typed in your query, and in return, you'd get millions of search results, ordered by their relevance and popularity, among several other factors. When the mobile revolution came, thanks in no small way to Android democratising the principles behind the iPhone, the way people interacted with technology changed. But the way information was understood, processed, and sorted on the Internet remained largely text-bound. "All of Google was built because we started understanding text and webpages," CEO Sundar Pichai said during his keynote address, at the developer-focused conference, Google I/O 2017. "The fact that computers can understand images and video has profound implications for our core mission."