Google launches Cloud AutoML to democratise AI

Google on Wednesday announced Cloud AutoML, a product that enables businesses with limited machine learning expertise to build high quality, custom AI models to improve their product or service.

Cloud AutoML is a simple, secure and flexible ML service that lets businesses and developers train custom vision models for their own use cases.

To make AI accessible to every business, businesses with limited ML expertise can leverage Cloud AutoML to start building their own high quality custom models by leveraging advanced techniques like learning2learn and transfer learning from Google.

Google's first Cloud AutoML release is Cloud AutoML Vision, a service that makes it faster and easier to create custom ML models for image recognition. Its drag and drop interface lets users easily upload images, train and manage models, and then deploy those trained models directly on Google Cloud.

To get access to AutoML Visions, developers currently have to apply for access. The pricing for the services is yet to be clarified.

Commenting on the development, Head of Research and Development, Cloud AI and ML Jia Li said Google Cloud's goal has been to lower the barrier of entry and make AI available to the largest possible community of developers, researchers, and businesses.

"AutoML Vision is the result of our close collaboration with the Google Brain and other Google AI teams, and is the first of several Cloud AutoML products in development that aims to make it easier for more businesses to adopt ML," she said.

"While we're still at the beginning of our journey to make AI more accessible, we've been deeply inspired by what our 10,000+ customers using Cloud AI products have been able to achieve. We hope the release of Cloud AutoML will help even more businesses discover what's possible through AI," Li added.

Cloud AutoML's technology is already enabling businesses such as Disney Consumer Products and Interactive Media to build vision models to annotate its products with Disney characters, product categories, and colors.

Even though company says that AutoML is the only system of its kind on the market, the services like Clarif.ai and Microsoft's Cognitive Services can compete with Google.