Stanford, Snapchat Experts to Lead New Google Machine Learning Group

November 16, 2016

Google this week announced the formation of a new cloud machine learning group. The Google Cloud Machine Learning group will be focused exclusively on delivering cloud-based machine learning solutions to all businesses, according to cloud chief Diane Greene.

Leading this new group will be Fei-Fei Li, former head of Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Lab, and Jia Li, former head of research at Snapchat.

“The key to creating a culture of innovation is having the right team, technology and strategy in place,” said Rob Craft, Group Lead for Google Cloud Machine Learning. “Building a centralized team within Google Cloud will accelerate our ability to deliver machine learning products and services to enterprise customers in every industry.”

As part of Google’s quest to make machine learning more accessible to all businesses, the company also unveiled a new Cloud Machine Learning API to help people find careers; new hardware options to accelerate machine learning workloads; and and expanded features for their Cloud Translation, Cloud Vision and Cloud Natural Language APIs.

Beginning in 2017, Google Cloud will offer more hardware choices for businesses that want to use Google Cloud Platform for their complex workloads, including machine learning. For Google Compute Engine and Google Cloud Machine Learning, businesses will be able to use Graphics Processing Units that are specialized processors capable of handling the complexities of machine learning applications, the company says.

“Graphics Processing Units contain hundreds of times as many computational cores as CPUs and are great at accelerating risk analysis, studying molecular binding or optimizing the shape of a turbine blade,” says John Barrus, Product Manager, Google Cloud Platform. “Google Cloud GPUs give you the flexibility to mix and match infrastructure. Whether you need one or dozens of instances, you only pay for what you use.”