Google announced this Wednesday morning that they are in the process of acquiring Kaggle, the online service that hosts data science. The Silicon Valley-based company made the announcement in the Google Next Cloud conference in San Francisco, although they didn’t disclose the details of the purchase. Kaggle is the world’s largest community of data scientists, and it will provide Google the ability to broaden its reach.
Some of Kaggle’s features include running programming contests to crowdsource machine learning solutions. They offer forums, a database of public datasets and tutorials, just to name a few. The decision comes as no surprise, as the company has spent the last decade trying to innovate machine learning and develop artificial intelligence, one of Kaggle’s primary goals.
“Over time, the computer itself –whatever its form factor- will be an intelligent assistant helping you through the day. We will move from mobile first to an AI first world” wrote Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai on a last year letter to shareholders, according to CNET.
Artificial intelligence future
Kaggle prides itself on possessing AI innovation apps and tools. According to the site, Kaggle allows AI enthusiasts “climb the world’s most elite machine learning leaderboards,” “explore and analyze a collection of high quality datasets,” as well as “run code in the cloud and receive community feedback on your work.”
The Kaggle team will stay together, according to a blog post from CEO Anthony Goldbloom.
“The Kaggle team will remain together and will continue Kaggle as a distinct brand within Google Cloud. We will continue to grow our competitions and open data platforms, and we will remain open to all data scientists, companies, techniques and technologies,” wrote Goldbloom on today’s blog post.
Goldbloom also stated that joining Google will allow them to achieve more and that they’re excited to combine forces with ImageNet creators Fei-Fei Li and Jia Li. For her part, Fei-Fei Li wrote in her blog post that the acquisition would give Kaggle members a direct access to the most advanced cloud machine learning environment. She’s pronounced on the need to lower the barriers of entry to AI, because she believes that it must be made available to the largest community of developers, users, and enterprises so that they can apply it to their own personal needs.
Now, both Kaggle and Google will benefit from the merge and they’ll be able to achieve AI innovations never seen before.
Source: CNET