With Stadia, Google gets access to gaming data across wide range of games.This is going to be really valuable for its A.I!

During the start of the session, Pichai mentions how Deep Mind used ‘self-play’ technique to learn from games. Deepmind mastered complex games like Chess, Do and Shoji, and was able to beat the best Go players that the planet has ever seen!

For us it’s just a matter of playing game. For Google, it’s an important step towards creating general purpose A.I that can solve many foundational problems. Games will help A.I to tackle real-world challenges.

Games are really good for A.I since they are analogous to the real world but

with clearly defined objectives & rewards. we have seen this work in the case of OpenAI.

OpenAI founded by Elon Musk and Sam Altman, offers a helping hand in this context, literally. OpenAI Five is a machine learning project and a system that defeated human players in a Dota 2 game. The objective here is to learn the rules efficiently and win the game. The same system that learned from the game was then used to control the movements of a robotic hand ! What’s interesting to note here is that, It’s dexterity rapidly increased after learning from the Dota game.

The research team was able to observe key improvements as a result of the experimentation :

“We basically reached the same level of performance using the exact same code that was used for the Dota experiment,”.

“Within just a couple weeks we reached parity with what we had been trying to build for months before. I think we were all very surprised.”

Don’t get me wrong here: The Dota 2 bots won’t be able to control a robotic hand but the learning systems behind the Dota 2 bot and the robotic hand are general enough to solve each task with a very high level of ingenuity !

Now in the case of Google, its not just a robotic hand problem, it’s solving problems ranging from web-page indexing to self-driving-cars to back-flipping ATLAS. Stadia can fastrack solving such real-world problem solving which in turn can accelerate Google’s growth!