Cloud AutoML Gives Computers Ability to Create Custom AI

A deep learning algorithm is teaching itself how to recognize images in a cloud-based technology that could extend machine learning to millions of coders who don’t currently have the ability to develop systems, according to a story in TechnologyReview.com.

“The technology is limited for now, but it could be the start of something big. Building and optimizing a deep neural network algorithm normally requires a detailed understanding of the underlying math and code, as well as extensive practice tweaking the parameters of algorithms to get things just right. The difficulty of developing AI systems has created a race to recruit talent, and it means that only big companies with deep pockets can usually afford to build their own bespoke AI algorithms.”

Fei Fei Li, Chief Scientist at Google Cloud, said this will help scale AI machine learning for the estimated 21 million developers worldwide who need access to a more powerful system to create the programs that will be needed for custom AI solutions around the globe. Cloud computing will be important for making AI more accessible.

“Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and other companies are rushing to add machine-learning capabilities to their cloud platforms,” writes Will Knight of Technology Review. “Google Cloud already offers many such tools, but they use pretrained models. That limits what they can do—for example, programmers will only be able to use the tools to recognize a limited range of objects or scenes that they have already been trained to recognize. A new generation of cloud-based machine-learning tools that can train themselves would make the technology far more versatile and easier to use.”

Automating AI is expensive, but Google is investing in the technology because as deep learning identifies the best way to train itself, Google stands to benefit most from the results.

Read more at technologyreview.com