Google made a big pitch for its cloud platform with machine learning as the focus at the ongoing Next conference in San Francisco. Conducted over March 8 to 10, the Next conference is focusing on enterprise services. The keynote for the event saw Google bring out the full show for its cloud business, a side of the company which isn’t highlighted often. While the search giant trails Amazon and Microsoft’s Azure in the segment, Amazon Web Services is seen as the market leader. Watch What Else Is Making News Google’s SVP for cloud business Diane Greene along with CEO Sundar Pichai, Eric Schmidt, and Dr Fei Fei Li, Google’s chief scientist for Cloud AI and Machine Learning, were the key speakers on the opening day. Greene has been the driving force behind the business since he joined the search giant in 2015. “Only last year we started calling ourselves Google Cloud. Cloud is where the digital revolution is going on. Cloud is no longer just where people store things, or for a startup or sharing files,” said Greene. In her address, she pointed out that data analytics was Google’s strength as was machine learning, and that’s exactly what they will offer to their enterprise customers. The other key speaker was Dr Fei Fei Li, who is the head of the Artificial Intelligence Lab at Stanford University, and joined Google’s cloud business earlier in the year. Li has helped create one of the largest databases for image training for AI, ImageNet. She also announced a new video API for Google’s cloud services. The new video intelligence API will help businesses quickly shift through large repositories of videos files, and locate exactly that part of the clip, which is required. For example, if a media house needs to look through a vast trove of videos to find clips which have a beach in them, this API will do that while saving time. To boost its machine learning capabilities on the cloud, Google also announced the acquisition of Kaggle, which is used by over 800,000 data experts. Kaggle has been building datasets which are publicly available, and used to aid machine learning. Google didn’t disclose how much it paid for Kaggle. “Democratising artificial intelligence is important. We need to lower the barriers and make these tools available the largest possible community of developers, enterprises,” said Li during her address. Li pointed out how AI and machine learning have come a long way, and that Google’s cloud will help enterprises use these capabilities to make their tasks easier. “Vision API has been under steady development. We’ve added new capabilities, and there’s been an expansion of meta data from Google’s knowledge graph. So the vision API will now have all powers of Google image search,” she added. “For 15 years, we’ve invested heavily in AI, machine learning. Businesses can now rely on these tools to build better products,” said Sundar Pichai during the keynote address. Google also announced that the cloud machine learning engine is now out of beta, and will be available to most developers and enterprises. Google showed off Disney, Home Depot, HSBC, eBay, Colgate, as its customers at the event. It should be noted that most of these players have a multi-strategy for cloud business. For instance, Snap Inc, which is the parent company of Snapchat, partners with Google and Amazon Web Services for its cloud solutions. (The correspondent is attending the Next conference on the invitation of Google India)
