Google, Facebook collaborates on AI tech

In a rare collaboration on joint tech projects between two of the world’s technology firms, American search engine behemoth Google is strengthening its partnership with US-based social media giant Facebook on development of their respective artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.

Under the partnership, Google will integrate the social media company’s open source machine learning PyTorch framework across its hardware and software tools for the development of its AI technologies.

Engineers from both the organizations are partnering to make the Mark Zuckerberg-led company’s PyTorch framework work with Sunder Pichai-led firm’s Tensor Processing Units (TPU) that are custom computer chips for machine learning.

Engineers on Google’s TPU team are partnering with Facebook’s PyTorch framework to connect Cloud TPUs with PyTorch. The collaboration envision to allow both the companies to benefit from the flexibility and simplicity of PyTorch and the cost-efficiency, scalability, and performance of Cloud TPUs.

Machine learning (ML) developers use several tools and the search engine behemoth has integrated some of the popular open source frameworks into its products and services, including PyTorch, XGBoost, scikit-learn, and TensorFlow.

Google initially introduced its TPUs in its annual developer conference organized in 2016 and insisted that the TPUs are a far greater efficient way for researchers and companies to power their ML software projects.

Google sells access to its TPUs through its cloud computing business rather than selling the chips to customers such as Nvidia, whose GPUs, or graphics processing units, are popular with researchers and companies working on deep learning projects.

AI technologies such as ML and deep learning have risen in popularity over the recent years with technology behemoths such as Facebook and Google that employ the technologies to create software apps that can automatically perform tasks such as identifying images in photos.

With more and more organizations exploring ML technology, organizations such as Facebook and Google among others have developed their own artificial intelligence software frameworks, basically coding tools, which are designed to help developers to devise their own ML-powered software. These organizations have provided these artificial intelligence frameworks for free in an open source model so as to make them popular among coders.

Over the last few years, the search giant has been encouraging developers with its Tensorflow framework as the favorite coding tools for artificial intelligence projects and its TPU is developed to work best with Tensorflow. Now, the company is willing to update its TPUs to work better with PyTorch software and it intends to support more than its own artificial intelligence framework and achieve more cloud computing researchers and customers who are likely to use competing frameworks.

ML engineers and data scientists can choose from a broad array of open source tools while developing intelligent systems.

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