During the I/O developer conference, Google announced its new one today ML huba one-stop destination for developers who want more guidance in training and deploying their ML models, whether they are in the early stages of their AI careers or seasoned professionals.
“We’re talking about this concept of democratizing machine learning and really making it more accessible, so something we’re pretty excited about is that Google has a bit of a sprawling range of open source technologies that cover a lot of different resources (…) We want to make it much, much easier to understand how they fit together and actually help people get started,” said Alex Spinelli, vice president of product management for machine learning at Google. The idea here, he said, is to give developers a landing page where they can basically look at what kind of model they want to generate, based on the data they have, and then get step-by-step instructions on how to think about deploying those models.
The company is launching this platform with an initial set of toolkits covering a range of common use cases, with plans to update these regularly and launch new ones at a steady cadence. For example, some of the early toolkits can help developers build text classifiers with Keras or take large language models and run them on Android with Keras and TensorFlow Lite.
As Spinelli rightly pointed out, generative AI may be getting all the hype right now, but machine learning is a big space that spans a wide range of model types and technology.
“There’s amazing things going on in terms of computer vision and facial recognition and recommender systems and ranking content by relevance and things like that — clustering content — all that stuff. We really don’t want to leave anything behind and want to make sure we can actually help developers and researchers with the right set of tools and technologies for their specific use case,” Spinelli noted.
He noted that much of the focus here is on open source — and while developers can take these technologies and run them on-premises or in any cloud, these new toolkits will also allow for what he called a “glide path into the Google world.” cloud”. But as Spinelli stressed, there’s no lock-in here. “There’s a fundamental commitment that this is open source that you can use anywhere,” he said.
