Google is extensively working on deep learning and artificial intelligence technologies, but it is now planning to connect with a much larger community of data scientists. Thus, it is now acquiring Kaggle, the platform which brings together researchers and data miners by pitting them against each through competitions.
The details of the transaction are currently bleak but Google is expected to officially announce the said acquisition at their Cloud Next conference in San Francisco next week, reports TechCrunch. The tech giant is most likely expected to keep the platform operational, that too under its current name. It isn’t looking to gulp and merge Kaggle within any of its divisions but interact with the community to seek help and further progress their projects.
Headquartered in San Francisco, Kaggle was founded by Anthony Goldbloom and Ben Hamner in 2010. The said platform has since grown to become the largest community of data scientists on the interwebs. It currently has more than half a million registered users (or Kagglers) spanning over 194 countries. They belong to a wide variety of backgrounds, including fields such as computer science, computer vision, biology, medicine, and even glaciology.
Courtesy of its competitions, thousands of teams and individuals rush to the platform to participate and compete against each other to produce the best models for a particular problem set. Since these competitions are based on predictive modelling and analytics, there are numerous strategies to achieve the end result.
And now, Kaggle aims to help in singling out the most effective alternative using its unique crowdsourcing approach. It has also picked up a massive $12.75 million in funding from marquee investors including the likes of Index Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Max Levchin, Naval Ravikant, and Yuri Milner among others.
Further, Google and Kaggle are extending their on-going partnership, where the former is organizing a $100,000 machine learning competition. This competition asks data miners and developers to explore the best way of automatically tagging YouTube videos. It has made a data set of total 7 million YouTube, adding up to 450,000 hours of content available to these developers. It has also made Google Cloud Platform available to them to help them train their models.
We’ve contacted both parties involved for more information on the acquisition and will update you once we hear back from them.
