Google.ai aims to make state of the art AI advances accessible to everyone

On the stage of Google I/O, CEO Sundar Pichai announced Google.ai, a new initiative to democratize the benefits of the latest in machine learning research. Google.ai will serve as a center of Google’s AI efforts — including research, tools and applied AI.

The new site will host research from Google and its Brain Team. It also allows anyone to quickly access fun experiments that highlight the company’s progress in the field. This includes AutoDraw, that makes it possible for unskilled artists to put their ideas on paper, Duet that can play along with piano players and Quick, Draw!, a game where an AI tries to guess your drawings. A selection of videos and posts about Google’s AI-first efforts are also co-located.

Google’s Tensor Flow has played a pivotal role in making machine learning accessible to a greater number of developers. But every day new research comes from universities and private research labs and Google wants to help make that accessible too.

Pichai underscored the point that building machine learning models today is very time consuming and often expensive because of the scarcity of engineers with relevant skill-sets. As Google Cloud and Tensor Flow become more ubiquitous, engineers will be able to do more with less.

Pichai alluded to AutoML and a future where neural nets can create new neural nets on their own. This is a natural next step as researchers gain greater control of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and reinforcement learning gets applied in new and more challenging contexts.