Open Source is Helping to Drive the Artificial Intelligence Renaissance

Sam Dean | Ostatic Blog | January 4, 2017

We're only a few days into 2017, and it's already clear that one of the biggest tech categories of this year will be artificial intelligence. The good news is that open source AI tools are proliferating and making it easy for organizations to leverage them. AI is also driving acquisitions. As Computerworld is reporting, in the past year, at least 20 artificial intelligence companies have been acquired, according to CB Insights, a market analysis firm. MIT Technology Review is out with its five big predictions for AI this year. Here is a bit on what they expect, and some of the open source AI tools that you should know about.

Elon MuskAccording to MIT Technology Review: "This may also be the year in which China starts looking like a major player in the field of AI. The country’s tech industry is shifting away from copying Western companies, and it has identified AI and machine learning as the next big areas of innovation. In 2017, we are likely to see attempts to apply reinforcement learning to problems such as automated driving and industrial robotics. Google has already boasted of using deep reinforcement learning to make its data centers more efficient. But the approach remains experimental, and it still requires time-consuming simulation, so it’ll be interesting to see how effectively it can be deployed."

Meanwhile, Elon Musk has stepped in with the formation of OpenAI, which will focus on anticipating the challenges that AI will present in the coming years. It and Alphabet have recently open sourced important AI tools, as we covered here. The intersection of open source and AI has been a theme we've tracked on OStatic... Health Catalyst has created healthcare.ai as a repository of healthcare-focused open source machine learning software, with an eye toward encouraging the healthcare industry to tap into the power of AI and machine learning. According to an announcement...