Google announced major news yesterday by open sourcing TensorFlow, Google's very own machine learning system. Matt Cutts of Google said it was probably the biggest announcement in technology news that day - he was right.
In the Google+ post by Matt Cutts, Matt said this is in a sense Google revealing their own "secret sauce." Google has used machine learning for years and years, even before RankBrain for query interpretation, voice recognition, image search and rankings. Matt Cutts said by Google releasing this, it will benefit the "entire world."
Matt listed three reasons he is excited about this, the third was:
In many ways, machine learning has been an example of "secret sauce." I'm incredibly excited that Google is releasing technology so that the entire world can benefit, not just Google. It's the kind of decision that makes me proud of Google and its people.
The other two:
1. Machine learning is going to have a massive impact on the world. We've already seen that in areas from voice recognition to image understanding to language translation. In many ways, applying machine learning to problems unlocks all kinds of new opportunities. Tons of niches would support specialized startups applying machine learning to specific domains.2. In the past, Google has released papers like MapReduce, which described a system for massive parallel processing of data. MapReduce spawned entire cottage industries such as Hadoop as smart folks outside Google wrote code to recreate Google's paper. But the results still suffered from a telephone-like effect as outside code ran into issues that may have already been resolved within Google. Now Google is releasing its own code. This offers a massive set of possibilities, without reinventing the wheel.
Of course, SEOs trying to reverse engineer Google's algorithm with accessing the code base for TensorFlow is most likely a waste of time. So what 'secret sauce' was revealed?
Here is a video that explains better what this is all about:
Also the Google Research blog has more of a technical overview.
Forum discussion at Google+.
