In the digital strategy sessions I run we look at the operational aspects of digital marketing but also cast a wider view of emerging technology and trends. Often these trends take many years to become relevant and this is the case with machine-learning and its development into Generative AI that has taken the world by storm this year.
My interest in machine-learning began following a conversation with a Google engineer in 2014. ‘We used to know what was in the algorithm but we don’t now’, the engineer commented to me about the software behind Google’s ubiquitous search product. ‘A couple of years ago, one of my colleagues would have written the code to define the ranking factors but now we tell the algorithm our preferred outcomes and it codes itself,’ he continued. My first reaction to this was to ask, ‘have you not seen Terminator?’.
However, with hindsight, I realised this was the first time I’d heard of a full-blown application of machine-learning in the digital marketing ecosystem, which the following year, in 2015, was launched formally as RankBrain – an update to the Gordian Knot that is the Google search algorithm. The idea of RankBrain was to enlist the power of machine-learning to better understand the intent being individual searches – particularly ones the system hadn’t seen before – which makes up approximately fifteen per cent of the 8.5 billion Google searches carried out each day.
So, yes, my first reaction to apparently intelligent technology was ‘Killer Robots!’ - jumping straight to Skynet from the film Terminator, the fictional artificial intelligence that becomes aware and decides pesky humans are just getting in the way. Jump to 2022 and it seems...
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