Google Prefers Open Source For Its Machine Learning System 'TensorFlow'

Google, the subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., took a major leap on Monday when it announced that TensorFlow, its latest machine learning system has been open sourced for everyone.

“We hope this [open sourced TensorFlow] will let the machine learning community—everyone from academic researchers, to engineers, to hobbyists—exchange ideas much more quickly, through working code rather than just research papers”, Google said via blog post. “And that, in turn, will accelerate research on machine learning, in the end making technology work better for everyone.”

Google said that TensorFlow is a highly scalable machine learning system—it can run on a single smartphone or across thousands of computers in datacenters. It is used for a range of things from speech recognition in the Google app, to Smart Reply in Inbox, to search in Google Photos.

Jason Freidenfelds, a spokesman for the tech giant told Bloomberg that by releasing TensorFlow, Google aims to make the software it built to develop and run its own AI systems a part of the standard toolset used by researchers, said. It may also help Google identify potential talent.

TensorFlow was originally developed by researchers and engineers working on the Google Brain Team within Google's Machine Intelligence research organization for the purposes of conducting machine learning and deep neural networks research. However, the search engine giant said that the system is general enough to be applicable in a wide variety of other domains as well.