The second day of its annual Cloud Next conference, Google took to shine a spotlight on its upcoming AI tools. Google Cloud Platform is now giving AI creators a new, shared, end-to-end environment for teams to test, train, and deploy models called the AI Platform.
Google today also upgraded AutoML, its service for automating the creation of custom AI models, at the Cloud Next conference taking place this week in San Francisco. The company took the wraps off of a host of products targeting corporate pain points like document analysis, inventory and demand forecasting, and customer service touchpoint management.
“Many enterprises see the value in applying AI and machine learning to their business challenges, but not all have the necessary resources to do it,” said Google Cloud group product manager Levent Besik in a blog post. “Businesses need a quick and easy way to bring AI to their organizations, [and] from the beginning, our goal has been to make AI accessible to as many businesses as possible.”
The highlight of today’s announcements is the beta launch of the company’s AI Platform. The idea here is to offer developers and data scientists an end-to-end service for building, testing and deploying their own models. To do this, the service brings together a variety of existing and new products that allow you to build a full data pipeline to pull in data, label it (with the help of a new built-in labeling service) and then either use existing classification, object recognition or entity extraction models, or use existing tools like AutoML or the Cloud Machine Learning engine to train and deploy custom models.
“The AI Platform is this place where, if you are taking this terrifying journey from a journeyman idea of how you can use AI in your enterprise, all the way through launch and a safe, reliable deployment, the AI Platform help you move between each of these stages in a safe way so that you can start with exploratory data analysis, start to build models using your data scientists, decide that you want to use this specific model, and then with essentially one click be able to deploy it,” a Google spokesperson said during a press conference ahead of today’s official announcement.
The new is AutoML Video Intelligence (now in beta), which can automatically annotate and tag video, using object recognition to classify video content and make it searchable. For detecting objects in photos, Google also today launched the beta of AutoML Vision and for applications that run at the edge, Google launched the beta AutoML Vision Edge, which includes the ability to then deploy these models to edge devices.
AI Platform – and all the other big machine learning announcements from today’s event – is a step in the right direction for the entire field.