For data scientists already competing for prize money inside Kaggle, Google's recent acquisition of the crowdsourcing platform means the team will now have wider access to Google Cloud technologies. Both Google and Kaggle have posted on their blogs, without disclosing their numbers, about their new chapter in Data Science and machine learning. CEO Anthony Goldbloom announced their new cooperation on a recent blog post: "Making Google Cloud technology available to our community will allow us to offer access to powerful infrastructure, scalable training and deployment services and the ability to store and query large data sets."
Google - Kaggle community
Words of the acquisition were circulating just before a recent tech event, Google Cloud Next ’17, happening from March 8 to March 10 in San Francisco.
The rumors came off as more about the community at Kaggle; a playground started seven years ago to accommodate competitions and contests for data scientists. It has also been used by tech companies—such as Yelp, Walmart, and Facebook to name a few—to recruit promising new and rising stars from Kaggle’s talent pool of over 500,000 community members. The community is known as a pioneer in running machine learning competitions.
Three months ago, Google handed over a big "video understanding problem" it wanted to be solved for $100,000. After the contest at Kaggle, the tech company announced that it was hosting its own machine learning competition for startups using Google services. There are a bunch of people already with Google and working in its own startups who can solve major machine learning problems for the company.
Again, the whole crowdsourcing thing is more about the community of people coming together rather than just the technology.
Google Cloud AI
Google’s plan is quite clear: to have Kaggle as part of the team. Together they will be able to achieve the desired outcome of lowering the barriers of entry to Artificial Intelligence, something the search giant sees as the driving force behind the transformations at Google.
Recently appointed chief scientist at Google Cloud AI and Machine Learning, Fei-Fei Ling, wrote in a blog post about the acquisition, “Kaggle and Google Cloud will continue to support machine learning training and deployment services while offering the community the ability to store and query large datasets.”
