A closer look
Google researchers successfully trained a neural network using sixteen thousand computer processors in 2012, feeding it ten million random thumbnail images from YouTube just to see what the system would organically learn to recognize. Without any human intervention or labeled data, the highly advanced, multi-million dollar artificial intelligence spontaneously taught itself how to identify and output pictures of completely generic cats. It is simultaneously the greatest triumph of machine learning and the perfect distillation of the internet era, where even an unfathomably complex digital brain independently realizes that looking at felines is the absolute pinnacle of online existence. We spent untold fortunes constructing a silicon intelligence capable of processing vast amounts of data, and its first independent thought was basically deciding it wanted to watch cute animal videos just like the rest of us distracted mortals
