Thanks to the proliferation of data and advances in computing, the next decade promises to bring huge advances in AI[1]. This week, Google showcased a variety of AI research projects it's pursuing as an "AI first[2]" company. In some cases, such as Google's translation research[3], the commercial applications for Google already exist. In other areas, such as interactive textiles, the practical use cases aren't quite clear yet.
In all cases, according to Google AI chief Jeff Dean, Google's AI researchers are focused on the bigger picture.
"We try to do long-term work, and often that provides an arc of direction, where along the path of an eight- to 10-year journey we throw off useful results [for commercial applications]... and then continue to work on those harder problems," Dean said to reporters at Google's San Francisco office. "We're pretty excited for what the next decade is going to hold for us, and for everyone."
Dean highlighted a few of the more interesting problems and opportunities that AI researchers will address over the next decade. Multi-modal learning, for instance, is going to be a "growing trend," he said.
Unlike today's machine learning models, multi-modal models will be able to take multiple kinds of inputs -- such as text, audio or visual data -- and "do sensible things with them," Dean explained to ZDNet.
For example, he continued, "regardless of whether you see a picture of a leopard or you hear the word 'leopard' or you see the word leopard written, there's some common response in a model that helps you understand the properties of leopards, [such as] what they look like."
Another upcoming challenge that Dean cited is the ability to "take machine learning models that had to run in the past on