Earlier this week, Google released TensorFlow under an open source license. TensorFlow is Google’s machine learning system, or artificial intelligence, that is used in a variety of Google’s applications.
For example, Google Image search leverages TensorFlow technology to quickly identify the locations of photos based on landmarks, image components, and other image data, and Google Translate uses TensorFlow to quickly translate between languages.
According to the TensorFlow website, “TensorFlow is for everyone. It’s for students, researchers, hobbyists, hackers, engineers, developers, inventors and innovators and is being open sourced under the Apache 2.0 open source license.”
One potential result of open sourcing the technology–other than spurring frequent references to Skynet and The Terminator movies–is that the technology will improve, making Google products even more powerful.
“TensorFlow is not complete; it is intended to be built upon and extended. We have made an initial release of the source code, and continue to work actively to make it better. We hope to build an active open source community that drives the future of this library, both by providing feedback and by actively contributing to the source code.” reads the TensorFlow website.
Why’d Google release TensorFlow?
“We believe that machine learning is a key ingredient to the innovative products and technologies of the future. Research in this area is global and growing fast, but lacks standard tools. By sharing what we believe to be one of the best machine learning toolboxes in the world, we hope to create an open standard for exchanging research ideas and putting machine learning in products.” reads the website.
