Machine learning: platforms and developers will set the pace

Despite having removed its search engine from China, Google appears to be actively promoting its TensorFlow machine learning platform there, rightly seeing it as the market of the future for this service. After appearances at several private events, use in universities and by opinion leaders TensorFlow looks set to become the development platform of choice for students, academics and workers, in an environment where the development of all things machine learning is a national priority, and where there seem to be fewer privacy limits on data generation.

Google’s interest highlights the importance of the burgeoning machine learning market, one that is taking shape as we speak. This is the top priority at Google: the company believes it will define competitiveness, with companies redefining their activities around it, while having to provide competence and skills in machine learning to all staff at practically all levels: acquisitions, platforms, a presence on third-party platforms such as Amazon’s AWS and an apostolic zeal for a tool that many developers who use it regularly criticize harshly, but one that Google has committed itself to obtaining leadership in.

The future of machine learning will largely be determined by developers, who will adapt applications to make use of it. Companies like Facebook and others have made their platforms available in open source, while others like IBM are applying their commercial muscle to speed up its entry into the traditional corporate market, while smaller players like BigML — to which I am a strategic advisor — are applying it extensively to a wide range of solutions, noting that developers increasingly use it, as do more and more companies in just about every industry. The Chinese market represents possibly holds the fastest growing number of developers, where most companies are giving it high priority, an environment without the limitations of other countries.

Machine learning is already much more than a concept or a trend: it is defining the environments of the future, and companies know it. If getting to grips with machine learning is not on your agenda as a manager, you are missing something very important: the decisions that will shape your products and services are not going to be taken by you or managers like you, but your developers, sought-after talent who in many companies already occupy the highest-paid positions and with a completely different approach to traditional managers. The battle for control over the tools of the future will take place in other areas.

(En español, aquí)