Sundar Pichai at the company’s annual developer conference in Mountain View, California.

Machine-learning experts are in short supply as companies in many industries rush to take advantage of recent strides in the power of artificial intelligence. Google’s CEO says one solution to the skills shortage is to have machine-learning software take over some of the work of creating machine-learning software.

At Google’s annual developer conference today, Pichai introduced a project called AutoML coming out of the company’s Google Brain artificial intelligence research group. Researchers there have shown that their learning algorithms can automate one of the trickiest parts of the job of designing machine-learning software to take on a particular task. In some cases, their automated system came up with designs that rivals or beats the best work of human machine-learning experts.

"This is a very exciting development,” Pichai tells MIT Technology Review, in an e-mail. “It could accelerate the whole field and help us tackle some of the most challenging problems we face today.”

Pichai hopes the AutoML project can expand the number of developers able to make use of machine learning by reducing the expertise needed. This would fit in with Google’s strategy of positioning its cloud computing services as the best place to build and host with machine learning. The company is trying to lure new customers in the corporate cloud computing market, where it lags leader Amazon and second-place Microsoft (see “Google Reveals Powerful New AI Chip and Supercomputer”).