Astro Teller knows how to draw attention. As the director of X, aka the “moonshoot factory,” he famously navigates the Google campus on rollerblades, even indoors. He was wearing his rollerblades on Thursday when he glided into a roomful of reporters to announce that Project Loon—Alphabet's wacky-sounding plan to deliver the internet to the world's farthest-flung places via giant balloons—is even closer to reality than the company previously thought. It was a made-for-the-press moment, but Teller buried the lede. It's cool that these balloons may soon start broadcasting internet signals from the stratosphere. But the bigger deal here is that machine learning is moving beyond its digital origins into the real world.
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