Is artificial intelligence or AI, Silicon Valley's next big thing?

There is going to be a boom for design companies, because there's going to be so much information people have to work through quickly," said Diane B. Greene, head of Google Compute Engine, one of the companies hoping to steer an AI boom. "Just teaching companies how to use AI will be a big business." This kind of change is what keeps Silicon Valley going. When personal computers displaced mainframe computers, it opened the door not just for Apple, but for companies making PC software for business, games and publishing. In the networking and Internet revolutions, venture capitalists invested in these new computing styles, and another generation of companies was born. Over the last decade, smartphones, social networks and cloud computing have moved from feeding the growth of companies like Facebook and Twitter, leapfrogging to Uber, Airbnb and others that have used the phones, personal rating systems and powerful remote computers in the cloud to create their own new businesses. Believe it or not, that stuff may be heading for the rearview mirror. The tech industry's new architecture is based not just on the giant public computing clouds of Google, Microsoft and Amazon, but also on their AI capabilities. These clouds create more efficient and supple use of computing resources, available for rent. Smaller clouds used in corporate systems were designed to connect to them. The AI resources Greene is opening up at Google are remarkable. Google's autocomplete feature that most of us use when doing a search can instantaneously touch 500 computers in several locations as it guesses what we are looking for. Services like Maps and Photos have more than 1 billion users, sorting places and faces by computer. Handling all that, plus tasks like language translation and speech recognition, Google has amassed a wealth of analysis technology that it can offer to customers. Urs Holzle, Greene's chief of technical infrastructure, predicts that the business of renting out machines and software will eventually surpass Google advertising. In 2015, ad profits were 16.4 billion. "In the '80s, it was spreadsheets," said Andreas Bechtolsheim, a noted computer design expert who was Google's first investor. "Now it's what you can do with machine learning." He added: "Better maps and photos is just the start.