Technology
Google is introducing an AI competitor called Keen Silently
Keen: a competitor to Pinterest that draws on the machine-learning resources of the search giant to cure themes, is a Google's region 120 squad, an in-house incubator developing new applications and services.
Co-founder CJ Adams, which is now available on the Internet and Ios, said Keen strives to be an alternative to "detainment" web navigation feeds.
"You say [...] at Keen what you want to spend more time on, then curate web content and people that you trust to help," Adams says in a blog post. "You make a 'keen,' which can cover every subject, be it baking delicious bread at home or birding or typography research.
Keen helps you to curate your content, share your collection and discover new material on the basis of the information you saved.
Of note, this is not a discovery presentation. About every social media feed that you browse attempts to personalize its content in one way or another to your interests.
And Pinterest has conquered the hobby side of this market with the graphic nature of the pinboard — two features Keen tries to mimic.
And what's that Pinterest doesn't have for Keen? Okay, it's got Google's machine training expertise for one thing, which Adams says is going to "relevant helpful material."
"You can also start curating a keen and saving some interesting 'sweets' or links that you think are helpful, also if you are not experts on a subject," says Adams. "The information bits behave like seeds and allow you to discover material that's increasingly connected over time."
However, it's not like Pinterest doesn't heavily invest in AI too. While the ability of machine learning to find designs in data is beyond that of humans in many ways, I would suggest that collective experiences from a broad and committed (I suggest keen?) usage base are, for the time being, beyond machines.
But there is also the question of what is being released from this project by Google in terms of data. The enterprise could never break into the social sphere, which produces scads of lucrative data for advertising targets.
A social network like Pinterest will allow it to answer the desires of users and collect this information. So it seems the data collected by Keen has all that Google knows about users collected. Using your Google Account, you log in to Keen and click the button "privacy" on the page that lists the privacy policy for Google.
At any rate, Google's push its machines to a wider variety of applications is interesting. Especially those that seem to want to enable users to reward hobbies instead of algorithms that push people to participate more without caring about what they really have.
