Tech giants are using open source frameworks to dominate the AI community
0Tech giants are using open source frameworks to dominate the AI community.
Tech giants such as Google and Baidu spent from $20 billion to $30 billion on AI last year, according to the recent McKinsey Global Institute Study. Out of this wealth, 90 percent fueled R&D and deployment, and 10 percent went toward AI acquisitions.
Research plays a crucial role in the AI movement, and tech giants have to do everything in their power to seem viable to the AI community. AI is mostly based on research advances and state-of-the-art technology, which is advancing very quickly. Therefore, there is no business need to make closed infrastructure solutions, because within a few months everything will be totally different.
In such a situation, the only winning strategy for tech giants is to offer open source solutions to attract members of the AI community and eventually become part of the AI community themselves. This is a relatively new model in the tech industry.
Back in 2015, Google put a significant amount of marketing effort behind the release of its open source framework solution TensorFlow, a back-end library that is now widely used by the community (including OpenAI). Many entrepreneurs continue to train their models using this platform. Basically, it’s a widely used framework for deep learning tasks.