Google makes available to public AI technology

Microsoft company stated on Monday, 25 January, it would make available to public use its Artificial Intelligence program called CNTK, under MIT-style license, meaning that it is accessible to all at no cost through the Internet. It can be owned by anyone or used or subject to modification as much as it pleases.

CNTK (Computational Network Toolkit) is a learning tool particularly used by Microsoft as a speech recognition software which is also to be found either in Cortana voice assistant or in Skype automated translation tool. This was based on "deep learning", a new area of Machine Learning research relying on learning representations of data, in which Web giant make massive investments.

This program was already made partially accessible to public last April by Microsoft, but for academic research purposes only. Now, these restrictions are lifted.

Microsoft is not the only company to have made public its Artificial Intelligence programs. Last November, Google made at everyone's disposal its own Machine Learning technology, followed by Facebook who revealed its server secrets used for AI related projects. On January 14, Chinese Web services company Baidu joined in by opening its deep learning tool

Are there any benefit for those Web companies? Yes, first of all, by providing free access to such valuable technologies, these companies seek to win the battle of communication and to stand out in AI area. Moreover, the more their tools are being used, the more important they become to developers. Plus, users actually contribute to improving these tools, improvements enjoyed by companies themselves to develop their own technologies and commercial applications.