Jeff Dean

“We're training Google Street View to recognize street numbers.”

“It would be great to have every engineer have at least some amount of knowledge of machine learning.”

“Health care has a lot of interesting machine-learning problems - outpatient outcomes, or when you have x-ray images and you want to predict things.”

“As devices continue to shrink and voice recognition and other kinds of alternative user-interfaces become more practical, it is going to change how we interact with computing devices. They may fade into the background and just be around, allowing us to talk to them just as we would some other trusted companion.”

“Microsoft is in a lot of the same businesses that Google is in.”

“I think there are a lot of industries that are collecting a lot of data and have not yet considered the implications of machine learning but will ultimately use it.”

“As a society I think we are going to be much better off by having machines that can work in conjunction with humans to do things more efficiently and even better in some cases. That will 'enable humans to do things that they do better than machines.”

“Deep learning is a really powerful metaphor for learning about the world.”

“There's nothing like necessity of needing to do something to cause you to come up with abstractions that help you break through the forms.”

“I worry policymakers are not putting enough attention on what we should be planning for 10 years down the road. In general, governments aren't necessarily that good at looking down the road when it is a difficult issue.”

“Definitely there's growing use of machine learning across Google products, both data-center-based services, but also much more of our stuff is running on device on the phone.”

“Computers can see, and understand what people say via speech recognition.”

“Reinforcement learning is the idea of being able to assign credit or blame to all the actions you took along the way while you were getting that reward signal.”

“One of the things that inspires me about working for Google is that when we solve a problem here, we can get that used by one million or even a billion people. That is very motivating as a computer scientist.”

“The speech recognition is now good enough that I dictate emails on my phone rather than type them in. It's not perfect, but it's good enough that it changes how I interact with my phone.”

“The things that I really enjoy doing are finding interesting problems and working together with colleagues to figure out how we can solve them.”

“People in my organization were very outspoken about what we should be doing with the Department of Defense. One of them is work on autonomous weapons. That, to me, is something I don't want to work on or have anything to do with.”

“I think true artificial general intelligence would be a system that is able to perform human-level reasoning, understanding, and accomplishing of complicated tasks.”

“We want to build systems that can generalize to a new task. Being able to do things with much less data and with much less computation is going to be interesting and important.”

“Previously, we might use machine learning in a few sub-components of a system. Now we actually use machine learning to replace entire sets of systems, rather than trying to make a better machine learning model for each of the pieces.”