The official at Google publicized that they are acquiring the firm named ‘Kaggle’ which is an online service that hosts data science and machine learning competitions.
The company made the announcement at its Google Cloud Next conference in San Francisco, but they did not disclose the terms of the acquisition. But it’s not all that surprising that Google would want to snap it up. With the increasing number of data scientists on the platform, it would give Google the instant ability to extend its reach within the AI community. As it progressively goes head-to-head with Amazon on the cloud computing front, it’s going to need as much of superiority as it can get.
This, too, will help Google grow its brand more rooted within the data science community — nevertheless it’s already a staple thanks to its projects like TensorFlow. Google is facing cumulative competition as the AI space breaks into verticals, like self-directed driving and deep learning, opening up holes that smaller and larger companies can exploit. That could supposedly remove Google from the conversation as the firm with the best AI operations, which is known for watershed AI moments like defeating the Go world champion.
Purchasing Kaggle, and its mindshare inside the community, will also possibly help with recruiting. Google needs to guarantee that it keeps snapping up the best talent who specializes in deep learning, competing with other companies like Pinterest (which mainly focuses on visual search). Even if this isn’t a more specialized tech acquirement, it means that Google is broadening its focus to explore more perpendicular approaches to ensure its dominance in AI.
