TECH PUNDIT TIM O’Reilly had just tried the new #GooglePhotos app, and he was amazed by the depth of its artificial intelligence.
O’Reilly was standing a few feet from #Google CEO and co-founder @LarryPage this past May, at a small cocktail reception for the press at the annual #GoogleI/O conference—the centerpiece of the company’s year. Google had unveiled its personal photos app earlier in the day, and O’Reilly marveled that if he typed something like “gravestone” into the search box, the app could find a photo of his uncle’s grave, taken so long ago.
The app uses an increasingly powerful form of artificial intelligence called deep learning. By analyzing thousands of photos of gravestones, this AI technology can learn to identify a gravestone it has never seen before. The same goes for cats and dogs, trees and clouds, flowers and food.
The Google Photos search engine isn’t perfect. But its accuracy is enormously impressive—so impressive that O’Reilly couldn’t understand why Google didn’t sell access to its AI engine via the Internet, cloud-computing style, letting others drive their apps with the same machine learning. That could be Google’s real money-maker, he said. After all, Google also uses this AI engine to recognize spoken words, translate from one language to another, improve Internet search results, and more. The rest of the world could turn this tech towards so many other tasks, from ad targeting to computer security.
Well, this morning, Google took O’Reilly’s idea further than even he expected. It’s not selling access to its deep learning engine. It’s open sourcing that engine, freely sharing the underlying code with the world at large. This software is called TensorFlow, and in literally giving the technology away, Google believes it can accelerate the evolution of AI. Through open source, outsiders can help improve on Google’s technology and, yes, return these improvements back to Google.
“What we’re hoping is that the community adopts this as a good way of expressing machine learning algorithms of lots of different types, and also contributes to building and improving [ #TensorFlow ] in lots of different and interesting ways,” says Jeff Dean, one of Google’s most important engineers and a key player in the rise of its deep learning tech.
In recent years, other companies and researchers have also made huge strides in this area of #AI, including #Facebook, #Microsoft, and #Twitter. And some have already open sourced software that’s similar to TensorFlow. This includes Torch—a system originally built by researchers at New York University, many of whom are now at Facebook—as well as systems like Caffe and Theano. But Google’s move is significant. That’s because Google’s AI engine is regarded by some as the world’s most advanced—and because, well, it’s Google.
“This is really interesting,” says Chris Nicholson, who runs a deep learning startup called Skymind. “Google is five to seven years ahead of the rest of the world. If they open source their tools, this can make everybody else better at machine learning.”
To be sure, Google isn’t giving away all its secrets. At the moment, the company is only open sourcing part of this AI engine. It’s sharing only some of the algorithms that run atop the engine. And it’s not sharing access to the remarkably advanced hardware infrastructure that drives this engine (that would certainly come with a price tag). But Google is giving away at least some of its most important data center software, and that’s not something it has typically done in the past.
Google became the Internet’s most dominant force in large part because of the uniquely powerful software and hardware it built inside its computer data centers—software and hardware that could help run all its online services, that could juggle traffic and data from an unprecedented number of people across the globe. And typically, it didn’t share its designs with the rest of the world until it had moved on to other designs. Even then, it merely shared research papers describing its tech. The company didn’t open source its code. That’s how it kept an advantage.
http://www.wired.com/2015/11/google-open-sources-its-artificial-intelligence-engine/
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