It has been quite a while, about two years or so, since Google decided that none of the options that could be acquired in the market at that time were interesting enough for the company to be selected and start working with them in all that novelty, at that time, which was the Artificial Intelligence and machine learning.
It was precisely then that literally the engineers of the famous North American company decided to literally bet design and manufacture your own hardware, which was baptized with the name of TPU (Tensor Processing Unit). Undoubtedly a move that at the time was widely commented on by the entire industry since literally, as it was later shown, gave Google a great advantage over the rest of its competitors in this area thanks to the benefits offered by a processor such as this.
Perhaps and at this point it is not understood very well what TPU was capable of to get Google to be at the forefront of any development related to the world of artificial intelligence and machine learning, as a detail, tell you that, among the projects that this processor has given life, is nothing less than AlphaGo, that software that at the time was able to win the best Go player on the planet, its interesting Assistant or the different tools based on artificial intelligence such as TensorFlow.
Google takes another step into the world of artificial intelligence and machine learning and, for that, it has decided that its TPU will cease to be used exclusively for company projects
At this point, Google has decided that the time has come to go one step further and with this they have made the important decision to release the use of your TPU so that it goes from being exclusively used by Google projects to any interested company can start using it.
The idea of the American multinational is none other than to offer its impressive processor so that it can be exploited by different companies in other sectors of the market. On the other hand and thanks to this movement, Google will ensure that other companies very involved in issues related to machine learning and artificial intelligence do not invest their money in the development of their own processors and start to use the one offered by Google through its cloud servicesIn other words, Google will make the architecture behind TPU much more universal.
Now, as has been announced, it is true that any interested company may contract TPU-based computing capacity Although, perhaps here is the negative part, for now this service will only be available to be used by business customers. Another quite striking point, we do not know very well why it has been hidden, we find it in that Google has not wanted to reveal the price of use of its TPU.
Google will be the first company to offer machine learning and artificial intelligence services to other companies
Personally, I have to confess that the Google movement has caught me by surprise, especially if we take into account that other large companies, such as Amazon, Microsoft or Apple, have shown no signs of a similar movement. In this way, Google has managed to become, on its own merits, the first company to open its artificial intelligence platform to the world offering a ready-to-use service in complicated configurations or after expensive developments.
As for potential customers who have confirmed they are interested in using these services, highlighting, for example, Lyft, which has just presented its new autonomous cars. On the other hand, it has been confirmed that the next step they want to take in Google is cut as much as possible their dependence on other manufacturers such as Nvidia, today in charge of supplying the chips used by this platform.