X (company)

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X (until the beginning of 2016 Google X ) refers to a research department of the US company Alphabet Inc. The research laboratory is located near the central Google campus in Mountain View, California .

Goals and ambitions

The name Google X is a play on words, where X stands for the unknown, so the company name means searching for the unknown . The chief researcher is Google co-founder Sergey Brin . The company was built up by the German robotics expert Sebastian Thrun .

The company was created to implement the extremely ambitious goals of the Google founders. Like his role model Nikola Tesla, Larry Page would like to contribute to progress as an important inventor. He has summarized his philosophy under the term 10X Thinking. That is supposed to mean that it is easier to do everything ten times better than just 10 percent better. Larry Page wrote the phrase "There is little competition in exploring technological limits because nobody is crazy enough to try".

Moonshot

Google has a name of its own for projects looking for a big hit: Moonshot . The term refers to the famous announcement by US President John F. Kennedy at the beginning of the 1960s to the end of the decade that he would shoot a person on the moon. Sebastian Thrun reports that Google's mantra is: “If you change the lives of 100 million people, you will not be successful. You won't be until you change the lives of a billion people. ”With regard to research costs and product development costs , it goes on to say: The price we are after is so great that money does not play a role on the way there.

Projects

X's projects include Google Glass (a miniature computer worn on the head as part of augmented reality ), a digital contact lens for measuring blood sugar levels (discontinued November 16, 2018) and the development of autonomous vehicles (see Waymo ). Projects such as Project Loon (internet services via balloons in the stratosphere ) and Project Wing (parcel delivery by drone) were outsourced to independent companies after completion.

Google Brain and DeepMind

With the Google Brain project, Google is trying to mimic the way neuron connections work in the brain. For this purpose, the computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton was recruited, who wants to merge computer and neuroscience with his deep learning theory . In January 2014, Google also acquired the British artificial intelligence laboratory DeepMind for $ 450 million . The research improved speech recognition for Android , Google's operating system . as well as the translation service Google Translate.

Web links

Commons : X  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Google X Has a New Logo and New Plan to Turn Moonshots Into Actual Businesses. In: Re / code. Retrieved January 15, 2016 .
  2. ↑ Inside Google's Secret Lab . Business week. Retrieved January 17, 2014.
  3. ↑ Google X: Where Google is researching the future . The standard. Retrieved January 17, 2014.
  4. ↑ a b c Thomas Schulz: Larry and the moon drivers . Cover story in Der Spiegel 2014 No. 10 from March 1, 2014
  5. ↑ a b Google X Announces Project Loon: Balloon-Powered Internet For Rural, Remote And Underserved Areas . Techcrunch. Retrieved January 17, 2014.
  6. ^ Brian Otis: Update on our Smart Lens program with Alcon . In: Verily Blog . November 16, 2018. Retrieved November 21, 2018.
  7. ↑ Driverless car: Google awarded US patent for technology . BBC. Retrieved January 17, 2014.
  8. ↑ Introducing Project Wing on Youtube