I just read some really exciting news on the Google blog. Turns out our dear big brother, Google, has open-sourced their AI program, called TensorFlow.
To put it in perspective, TensorFlow is the software powering Google Photos, voice recognition in the Android OS and so much more. It’s a really big deal over at Google HQ.
By open-sourcing TensorFlow, Google has provided programmers and researchers actionable models for recognizing photographs, handwriting and text. The code is available under an Apache 2 license, which grants everyone free access to use the code as they please.
“But the most important thing about TensorFlow is that it’s yours. We’ve open-sourced TensorFlow as a standalone library and associated tools, tutorials, and examples with the Apache 2.0 license so you’re free to use TensorFlow at your institution (no matter where you work),” the announcement on the blog read.
“Machine learning is still in its infancy—computers today still can’t do what a 4-year-old can do effortlessly, like knowing the name of a dinosaur after seeing only a couple of examples, or understanding that “I saw the Grand Canyon flying to Chicago” doesn’t mean the canyon is hurtling over the city. We have a lot of work ahead of us. But with TensorFlow we’ve got a good start, and we can all be in it together.”
From what I’ve read, you’ve gotta know your code pretty well (some high level C++ and Python) to be able to use the TensorFlow program. But nonetheless, it’s pretty exciting news. Experts at Wired are saying by open-sourcing this program, Google may have helped the rate of development of machine learning and AI by at least six years.
This may just be the dawn of a new era (or the birth of Skynet).
Visit the TensorFlow site to begin.
