Google Open-Sources The Machine Learning Tech Behind Google Photos Search, Smart Reply And More

Google says today it’s making the machine learning technology that powers a number of its products, including Google Photos search, speech recognition in the Google app, and the newly launched “Smart Reply” feature for its email app Inbox. Called TensorFlow, the technology helps makes apps smarter, and Google says it’s far more powerful than its first-generation system – allowing the company to build and train neural nets up to five times faster than before.

For Google, that means it’s able to improve its products more quickly, the company explains. TensorFlow was originally a project developed by researchers and engineers working on the Google Brain Team within Google’s Machine Intelligence research organization for the purpose of conducting machine learning and deep neural networks research. But the technology is applicable to a number of other domains, as well, says Google...

The goal with machine learning is to build a technology that works similarly to the human brain, but the technology is not there yet, by any means. In Google’s blog post announcing the news, penned by CEO Sundar Pichai, he explains that by open-sourcing the technology, the hope is that it will accelerate research on machine learning that would benefit the entire community, and make the technology work better. As Pichai points out, even the best systems today struggle to do what a 4-year-old child can do – like know the name of a dinosaur after only seeing a couple of examples, or understand that the sentence “I saw the Grand Canyon flying to Chicago” doesn’t mean there’s actually a flying canyon in the air...