Alphabet's Eric Schmidt sees a huge future for machine learning

The man who helped build Google from a search engine into one of the biggest and most influential companies in the world predicted the emergence of a new computing architecture based on crowd-sourced data and machine learning. Speaking at Google's GCP Next cloud computing conference in San Francisco On Wednesday, Alphabet Chairman Eric Schmidt said the combination of crowdsourced data and machine learning will be the basis of "every successful huge IPO" in five years. He said the adoption of machine learning will allow companies to mine crowdsourced data, which already provides a mass of information not previously available to companies, and improve on it. "You're going to use machine learning to take that data and do something that's better than what the humans are doing," he said. Schmidt said the wide adoption of machine learning in computing will be as significant as the switch from the web to smartphone apps, which spawned the success of companies like Uber and Snapchat.