Google X Lab - Robotics and AI

The Google X Lab is a secret laboratory where Google experiments with future technologies. The research projects are not public knowledge but it is thought they include artificial intelligence and robotics.

Google HQ

Information about the lab first came to light in a Business Insider article in June 2011. They heard about it from the journalist and Google expert Steven Levy. More detail emerged in a New York Times article in November 2011. The NYT article states the following:

  • The lab is at an undisclosed location in the Bay Area, California
  • Investment is very small compared to investments made in Google's core businesses
  • Sergey Brin, Google's co-founder, is deeply involved in the lab
  • Larry Page, Google's other co-founder, worked on Google X before becoming CEO in April 2011
  • Larry and Sergey came up with a list of 100 shoot-for-the-stars ideas, including:
    • Robotic avatars, telepresence, for telecomuters and meetings (implied from second paragraph, and here)
    • Driverless cars (these are fairly public knowledge)
    • Space elevator
    • Projects involving Web of Things
    • Web-connected light bulb communicates with Android (to be unveiled by end of 2011)
  • The Google X Lab is run mysteriously, clandestine, secret even from most Google employees
  • Two offices: logistics on the Mountain View campus, and the robotics lab at a secret location
Lab is filled with roboticists and electrical engineers, hired from Microsoft, Nokia Labs, Stanford, M.I.T., Carnegie Mellon, and New York University. They include:
  • Sebastian Thrun (H) - a leader at Google X, one of the world's top robotics and artificial intelligence experts, teaches computer science at Stanford, invented the world's first driverless car
  • Andrew Ng (H, G) - Stanford professor, specializes in applying neuroscience to artificial intelligence to teach robots and machines to operate like people
  • Johnny Chung Lee (H), a specialist in human-computer interaction, came to Google X from Microsoft in 2011 after helping develop Microsoft's Kinect, working on Web of Things
  • Steve Lee, product director at Google, involved with Google Maps Indoors. Possibly let slip as a Google X team member.

See also:

  • Blog post by technology journalist MG Siegler. Says he first started hearing about Google X in March 2011.
Anonymous "leak" posted to reddit

On December 5, 2011, someone posted anonymously to reddit claiming to be a disgruntled former employee of the Google X Lab. See the thread: I recently left Google X. The original post by J32PMXR was deleted after two hours, but a copy is on pastebin.

The claim was made that Google, as of October 2011, had built an artificially intelligent robot that could pass the Turing Test 93% of the time via instant messaging. The physical robot itself is not particularly advanced because the focus is on software not mechanics. It is described as a "robotish looking thing on wheels" with a suite of sensors including optical, laser, infrared, ultrasonic, and depth cameras. It can supposedly lip read, although that might be restricted to detecting emotion, such as a smile. Most of the processing is done onboard, internet is used for external information. A stated goal is of the project is to enable intelligent conversation with your mobile phone, similar Apple's Siri but more advanced.

Replies to the posting express skepticsm, but they also admit that Google is likely working in a similar direction. Another former Google employee replies that the idea of using a robot is non-Googly. They say Google would approach AI via statistical methods and by throwing massive computing power at the problem. Larry Page has hinted at this approach himself, see quotes below.

Google's attitude towards artificial intelligence

It has been well-known for many years that the Google founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, are very interested in artificial intelligence. They have often talked about:

  • making Google Search artificially intelligent so that it knows exactly what information you are seeking
  • interfacing all of the world's online information directly to your brain

Google are also sponsors and founding partners of the Singularity University.

Here are some quotes where the Google founders talk about artificial intelligence:

Larry Page

"Artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google. The ultimate search engine that would understand everything on the Web. It would understand exactly what you wanted, and it would give you the right thing. We're nowhere near doing that now. However, we can get incrementally closer to that, and that is basically what we work on." Larry Page, October 2000 (source)

"Google will fulfill its mission only when its search engine is AI-complete. You guys know what that means? That's artificial intelligence." Larry Page, May 2002 (The Big Switch, page 212)

"The ultimate search engine would understand exactly what you wanted when you typed in a query, and it would give you the exact right thing back, in computer science we call that artificial intelligence. That means it would be smart, and we're a long way from having smart computers." Larry Page, November 2002 (source)

"HAL had a lot of information, could piece it together, could rationalize it. Hopefully it would never have a bug like HAL did where he killed the occupants of the spaceship. But that [level of artificial intelligence] is what we're striving for, and I think we've made it a part of the way there." Sergey Brin, November 2002 (source)

Larry Page

"If you had all the world's information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you'd be better off." Sergey Brin, 2004 (source)

"Every time I talk about Google's future with Larry Page, he argues that it will become an artificial intelligence." Steve Jurvetson, January 2005 (source)

"We are not scanning all those books to be read by people, we are scanning them to be read by an AI." Unidentified Google engineer, October 2005 (source)

"One of our big goals in search is to make search that really understands exactly what you want, understands everything in the world. As computer scientists, we call that artificial intelligence." Larry Page, October 2005 (source)

"The ultimate search engine would understand everything in the world. It would understand everything that you asked it and give you back the exact right thing instantly. You could ask 'what should I ask Larry?' and it would tell you." Larry Page, May 2006 (source)

"People always make the assumption that we're done with search. That's very far from the case. We're probably only 5% of the way there. We want to create the ultimate search engine that can understand anything some people could call that artificial intelligence." May 2006 (source)

"Google wants to be the best in search. To reach that goal Google wants to have the world's top AI research laboratory." Google internal company paper, October 2006 (source)

"One of my favourite things is artificial intelligence, but it has gotten a very bad rap, but my prediction is that when AI happens it's going to be a lot of computation and not so much clever algorithms but just a lot of computation. My theory is that if you look at your programming, your DNA, it's about 600 megabytes compressed, so it's smaller than any modern operating system, smaller than Linux or Windows or anything like that, your whole operating system, that includes booting up your brain. So your program algorithms probably aren't that complicated, it's probably more about the overall computation. We have some people at Google who are trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale to make search better. Very few [other] people are working on this, and I don't think it's as far off as people think." Larry Page, February 2007 (source)

AI and computational power of the Google platform

Larry Page has been quoted as saying that "when artificial intelligence happens it will be not so much clever algorithms but just a lot of computation". So how much computational power does Google have, including all of its servers worldwide? Google keeps this information secret, but we can make some estimates.

As of January 2012 it was estimated that Google has around 1.8 million servers housed in its data centers worldwide. See the analysis and discussion here: How many servers does Google have?

The computational power of each server is also not explicitly revealed by Google. But in a paper released in 2009 it was suggested that each server contained two dual-core processors. We don't know what the processor specifications are, but we do know that Google tends to use cheap, low-performance hardware and lots of it. If we make an educated guess that each processor runs at 2 GHz, and we know the number of processors per server, and the number of servers, then we can make an estimate of the total computational power.

It turns out that the Google platform has more computational power than the world's largest supercomputer. A lot more. This is a fair comparison too because Google does in fact view their platform not as a collection of data centers, but as a single supercomputer. The total power of the platform, however, is not yet sufficient to run a complete human brain simulation - supposing that the same simulation architecture were used as in the Blue Brain Project.

The Google platform continues to grow, however. It is thought that they are adding another 500,000 servers in 2012. The system is designed to be able to cope with a total of 10 million servers. In a few years time the Google platform should be sufficiently powerful to run a complete simulation of a human brain, including displays of intelligence and self-awareness.