Reducing the entry barriers to artificial intelligence
Google has announced it intends to offer artificial intelligence development tools for the Raspberry Pi platform, the small €33 computer created by the British not-for-profit institution, which among other things has popularized access to microelectronics by selling more than ten million units in different versions (when originally they thought they were going to sell a thousand), as well as promoting a change to the UK’s Baccalaureate curriculum to include Computer Science.
Google has launched a survey for Raspberry Pi inviting users to state their level of experience, their knowledge of different languages and platforms and their interests. This will allow Google to not only properly target the options it can offer this community, but also provide an X-ray of their skill level and the popularity of the various options available to them. The questions in the survey refer, in general, to the type of projects users have carried out so far, using which programming languages or on what hardware, software or cloud computing platforms. From there, the survey asks about future interests, and about the possibilities that they believe would be offered by, for example, natural language processing, facial recognition or writing tools, etc.
What happens when relatively advanced artificial intelligence tools that allow us to carry out projects that would have been considered highly sophisticated a short time ago become a possibility thanks to a community of amateur makers who not only like to challenge themselves by creating new projects, but also to share them in the form of instructables and simple videos that allow other people to repeat them with step-by-step instructions? Google’s move could lead to the widespread popularization of these types of tools to a highly active community, which in turn could give rise to any number of possibilities at the general and academic levels. This is not the first time that Google has approached the Raspberry Pi Foundation to offer donations and aid: for the foundation, always interested in extending the scope of its action and in divulging the projects based on its platform, collaboration with Google opens an extremely interesting range of possibilities, consistent with its mission of popularizing technology and an authentic supercharge that will allow it to add an interesting field of activity to its community.
What are the benefits of a certain number of people seeing artificial intelligence as something accessible and affordable? What can the maker community do with artificial intelligence tools? Stand by for some very interesting results…
(En español, aquí)
