Google is restructuring to put machine learning at the core of all it does

Steven Levy is in characteristic excellent form in a long piece on Medium about the internal vogue for machine learning at Google; drawing on the contacts he made with In the Plex, his must-read 2012 biography of the company, Levy paints a picture of a company that's being utterly remade around newly ascendant machine learning techniques. Machine learning had humble beginnings in the company as a class given by and for engineers, which quickly captivated key technical staff around the world, blossoming into something like a full-fledged internal MOOC. Fast-forward to today and the company has moved its head of machine learning to be head of Search, Google's flagship product. Today, machine learning is "involved in every query" and affects the rankings in not "every query but in a lot of queries," with machine learning being the third-most important "signal" in how Google ranks its results. The company even produces its own machine learning-optimized chips, the Tensor Processing Unit, which take the place of the graphics cards that have been pressed into service across the industry for all kinds of parallel computation (from Bitcoin mining to AI), thanks to the thousands of small independent processors incorporated into their designs.