Google and Facebook Are Teaming Up on Artificial Intelligence Tech - It involves machines that can read your emotions
Google and Facebook Are Teaming Up on Artificial
Intelligence Tech
The Next Frontier of Artificial Intelligence
It involves machines that can read your emotions.
By JONATHAN VANIAN October 2, 2018
Google and Facebook are teaming up to make each company’s
artificial intelligence technologies work better together.
The two companies said Tuesday that an unspecified number
of engineers are collaborating to make Facebook’s open source machine learning
PyTorch framework work with Google’s custom computer chips for machine
learning, dubbed Tensor Processing Units, or TPU. The collaboration marks one
of the rare instances of the technology rivals working together on joint tech
projects.
“Today, we’re pleased to announce that engineers on
Google’s TPU team are actively collaborating with core PyTorch developers to
connect PyTorch to Cloud TPUs,” Google Cloud director of product management
Rajen Sheth wrote in a blog post. “The long-term goal is to enable everyone to
enjoy the simplicity and flexibility of PyTorch while benefiting from the
performance, scalability, and cost-efficiency of Cloud TPUs.”
Facebook product manager for artificial intelligence
Joseph Spisak said in a separate blog post that “Engineers on Google’s Cloud
TPU team are in active collaboration with our PyTorch team to enable support
for PyTorch 1.0 models on this custom hardware.”
Google first debuted its TPUs in 2016 during its annual
developer conference, and pitched them as a more efficient way for companies
and researchers to power their machine-learning software projects. The search
giant sells access to its TPUs via its cloud computing business instead of selling
the chips individually to customers like Nvidia, whose graphics processing
units, or GPUs, are popular with researchers working on deep learning projects.
Artificial intelligence technologies like deep learning
have grown in popularity over the years with tech giants like Google and
Facebook that use the technologies to create software applications that can
automatically do tasks like recognize images in photos.
As more businesses explore machine learning technology,
companies like Google, Facebook, and others have created their own AI software
frameworks, essentially coding tools, intended to make it easier for developers
to create their own machine-learning powered software. These companies have
also offered these AI frameworks for free in an open source model in order to
popularize them with coders.
For the past few years, Google has been courting
developers with its so-called Tensorflow framework as the preferred coding
tools for AI projects, and it developed its TPUs to work best with Tensorflow.
The fact that Google is willing to update its TPUs to work with Facebook’s
PyTorch software shows that the company wants to support more than its own AI
framework and potentially gain more cloud computing customers and researchers
who may use competing frameworks.
“Data scientists and machine learning engineers have a
wide variety of open source tools to choose from today when it comes to
developing intelligent systems,” said Information Services Group principal
analyst Blair Hanley Frank. “This announcement is a critical step to help
ensure more people have access to the best hardware and software capabilities
to create AI models.”
Frank said that he expects “more collaboration like this
to crop up in the AI market.”
“Expanding framework support can help cloud providers
like AWS, Google and Microsoft drive additional usage of their platforms.”
Frank said. “That means it makes sense for them to support as broad a set of
development tools as possible, to try and attract as many customers as they
can.”
Besides Google, Facebook also said that Amazon and
Microsoft are “deepening their investment” in its PyTorch software.
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