During the Google Cloud Next conference in San Francisco earlier this week, the search engine announced its acquisition of Kaggle. The startup has been responsible for hosting competitions between data scientists that want to stand out in their field. Though the details of the deal were not shared, it is evident that both parties will benefit from the same.
As noted by Venture Beat, Kaggle competitions have been a platform for data scientists to make a name for themselves and help land jobs. These competitions hosted challenges that were provided by other companies. The acquisition will not change this and even the team will stay in place. However, it will not work under the distinctive brand of Google Cloud.
"We must lower the barriers of entry to AI and make it available to the largest community of developers, users and enterprises, so they can apply it to their own unique needs," said Fei-Fei Lei in a blog post, who is Google Cloud AI and Machine Learning's chief scientist. She then stated that the company's partnership with Kaggle will help accelerate this belief and mission.
By buying Kaggle, Google is opening its brand to the data science community. The company is definitely not a stranger to the industry, but this new acquisition is sure to help solidify its role in an every growing field. And with artificial intelligence branching out into fields like autonomous driving and deep learning, there is arguably no better time for the move.
But while Google has a clear and distinct end goal, the acquisition also opens several doors to the relatively small startup. By making the Cloud technology available to the community, more powerful infrastructures are becoming accessible to the people. Kaggle's blog post noted that the said advancement also provides scalable training and deployment services, as well as a larger storage facility for data sets.
