Google has cool technology to recognize images and speech, and IBM’s hardware can diagnose diseases and beat humans in Jeopardy.
Combine the two, and you get a powerful computer with serious brains.
IBM is merging Google’s artificial intelligence tools with its own cognitive computing technologies, allowing deep-learning systems to more accurately find answers to complex questions or recognize images or voices.
Google’s open-source TensorFlow machine-learning tools are being packed into IBM’s PowerAI, which is a toolkit for computer learning. The two can be combined to improve machine learning on IBM’s Power servers.
A computer learns as more data fed into its system, much like how a human learns. PowerAI and TensorFlow tools can help track patterns and classify data, and spit out approximate answers to queries. The answers will be more accurate as a computer learns more.
IBM already has Watson, which uses advanced software and hardware to find answers to complex questions. But PowerAI is more customizable compared to Watson, which is more of a pre-packaged set of hardware, software, and cloud technologies targeted at use models like medicine and finance.
Integrating TensorFlow into PowerAI will solve a big problem of installing Google’s machine-learning technologies on Power systems, said Sumit Gupta, vice president of high-performance computing and analytics at IBM.
