Enjoyment: 5 Feb 2016

Where AI Is Our Spirit Animal

February 5th, 2016 / by Tom Krazit

This week, we'll talk about one of the hottest enterprise tech startups around, a breakthrough in EU-US data relations, and the dawning of a new era at Google.

STRUCTURE NEWS

SLACK'S JOSH WILLS: "DATA IS COMING FOR YOUR INDUSTRY"

As the tech industry has turned into the economic engine of our times, its narrative is increasingly scripted by professional marketing and PR people who avoid the kind of blunt-but-honest speech that characterized early tech industry movers and shakers. That's why it was so refreshing to catch up last week with Structure Data 2016 speaker Josh Wills of Slack (pictured, with awesome hat) for a wide-ranging and honest conversation about Slack and the state of data engineering, which I wrote about here. (Don't worry, Slack, unfortunately he didn't say anything that would get him in trouble.)

STRUCTURE REWIND: HOW MCLAREN USES DATA AT FORMULA 1 SPEED

Data analysis is more than a tool for optimizing advertising inventory. Geoff McGrath of McLaren Applied Technologies is coming back to Structure Data 2016 to update our community on how one of Formula One's most iconic companies is using data to plan its future. Check out his talk from Structure Data 2014 here.

INDUSTRY NEWS

MICROSOFT PLUMBS OCEAN'S DEPTHS TO TEST UNDERWATER DATA CENTER

Remember when gamers used to snap up liquid-cooled PCs? (Look it up, Millennials.) Microsoft is taking that concept a step further by experimenting with servers placed off the coast of California in an attempt to create an underwater data center, as reported by The New York Times. If this really works and doesn't come with horrifying environmental effects, I say we rebuild coral reefs with data centers.

SUPER DEMAND FOR CRAY'S MASSIVE COMPUTERS DESPITE MOVES TO THE CLOUD

Speaking of things people born in the 1990s are unaware of, there is apparently a growing market for Cray supercomputers. The Seattle Times has a good look at a market that fell out of favor long before the cloud took hold, but is proving more resilient than expected thanks to the increasing need for computing power to tackle complicated workloads.

LOOKS LIKE DATA WILL KEEP FLOWING FROM THE EU TO THE US AFTER ALL

This always seemed like a cooler-heads-will-prevail kind of problem, but it's still good to see that the European Union has worked out an agreement for how data transfers between Europe and the U.S. will be handled, as reported by Fortune. The dispute, which could have had onerous effects on cloud startups if it endured, allows Europeans new avenues for complaining about data practices while affirming that the U.S. doesn't conduct mass surveillance of Europeans. Probably.

MICROSOFT STEPS UP AI PUSH WITH SWIFTKEY DEAL

It wasn't the most pivotal AI-related move of the week (more on that in a bit) but Microsoft Research stepped up its artificial intelligence game this week by snapping up SwiftKey, as reported by The Financial Times (subscription required). The company, which developed alternative software keyboards for iOS and Android devices, likely has a ton of data on mobile usage, something we'll be sure to ask Microsoft's Peter Lee about at Structure Data.

SOURCES: GOOGLE, VERIZON IN TALKS ABOUT STRATEGIC CLOUD PARTNERSHIP

Weeks after Verizon announced it would be getting out of the data center business, it appears to be banking on old friend Google to help it sell enterprise cloud services. CRN reports that the deal, which was described as "Google cloud with a Verizon wrapper," could be a win for both companies as Google seeks enterprise customers while Verizon flees the costs of operating data centers.

GOOGLE SAID TO ENDORSE QUALCOMM'S FLEDGLING SERVER-CHIP EFFORTS

Regular readers of this newsletter will sense a pattern here, as speculation about the future of data center chips heats up again, but here's a little smoke: Google plans to endorse a Qualcomm effort to produce ARM-based data-center processors, according to Bloomberg. Subsequent reports from IDG News Service indicated this move might be quite premature, and Intel's Diane Bryant suggested at Structure 2015 that cloud providers tease Intel with ARM love notes in order to extract pricing concessions, but watch this space.

BIG PICTURE

A new era at Google -- one many years in the making that was just waiting for the right technology -- began this week.

Amit Singhal, one of the most respected engineers in Silicon Valley and someone as responsible for Google/Alphabet's position as one of the most valuable companies in the world as anybody in Mountain View, announced that he would retire from his post overseeing the cash machine that is Google's search product in favor of John Giannandrea, a longtime Googler well-versed in the field of artificial intelligence. This is a very significant cultural move at Google: the product that keeps all Googlers in free sushi and multicolored bikes is being turned over to the machines.

Singhal is a tech legend who should be ranked up there with the leading figures of this industry. He was the architect and keeper of an earlier version of Google search in which weekly meetings were held to determine how to tweak the algorithms that powered one of the most significant web products ever devised, as I wrote about in this 2010 story for CNET.

But according to Wired, he was mildly skeptical about turning over the keys to Alphabet's kingdom to artificial intelligence. This is both totally understandable and obstructionist at the same time: the benefits that AI research could have on on internet search are immense, but there are fundamental problems, such as the fact that AI researchers don't always know why neural nets and similar tools produce the results they do.

This is something that we'll be sure to bring up at Structure Data 2016 with Jeff Dean, one of Google's leading AI researchers. But this week's move sends a clear signal: if Alphabet is willing to bet the future of its cash cow on artificial intelligence, the field is poised for an explosion.