The 'Google Brain' is a real thing but very few people have seen it

The entire tech industry is racing to build artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies, computers that can learn and react to stuff they've never seen before, sort of like a human brain.

Naturally, tech giant Google is smack dab in the middle of this trend.

Just like the move to mobile gave rise to companies like Uber and Snapchat, Google's chairman Eric Schmidt believes that machine learning will underpin the next crop of game-changing successful companies.

Google has built a team of machine learning researchers that call themselves the Google Brain Team. As this team creates new machine learning technology, they make it available to others as a service on Google's cloud.

But it turns out the Google Brain is actually a real thing that exists inside Google's massive collection of data centers, the company's head of cloud Diane Greene told attendees at the Oktane tech conference on Tuesday.

"Visiting the data centers. They are just unbelievable. They are acres and acres and you go through a double door and there's thousands and thousands more servers. There's not a lot of people," she says.

"And we have something called Google Brain, where we do our machine learning with special processors. And there's the Google Brain," she says, describing seeing it behind those double doors.

"It's like science fiction," she said.

One little known fact: Google's data centers and the Google Brain are not painted in "Google colors," the primary colors, popular with pre-schoolers, that are used for Google's products and the sprawling Googleplex HQ.

Instead, Google has hired artists to paint beautiful murals on the outside of its data center buildings.

Inside the data centers, the servers use LED lights, so they kinda of glow, just like you'd imagine a massive computer brain - one that is getting smarter all the time - to look. It does seem like science fiction.