Sun, Apr 09, 2017 page15

• Cloud computing makes powerful AI available to all

  • By Dina Bass and Mark Bergen / Bloomberg
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  In October last year, Deschutes Brewery Inc’s Brian Faivre was fermenting a batch of Obsidian Stout in a massive tank. Something was amiss; the beer was not fermenting at the usual temperature. Luckily, a software system triggered a warning and he fixed the problem.

  “We would have had to dump an entire batch,” the brewmaster said.

  The software that spotted the temperature anomaly is from Microsoft Corp and it is a new type that uses a powerful form of artificial intelligence (AI) called machine learning. What makes it potentially revolutionary is that Deschutes rented the tool over the Internet from Microsoft’s cloud-computing service.

  Day to day, Deschutes uses the system to decide when to stop one part of the brewing process and begin another, saving time while producing better beer, the company says.

  The Bend, Oregon-based brewer is among a growing number of enterprises using new combinations of AI tools and cloud services from Microsoft, Amazon.com Inc and Alphabet Inc’s Google.

  C-SPAN is using Amazon image-recognition to automatically identify who is in the government TV programs it broadcasts. Insurance company USAA is planning to use similar technology from Google to assess damage from car accidents and floods without sending in human insurance adjusters. The American Heart Association is using Amazon voice recognition to power a chat bot registering people for a charity walk in June.

  AI software used to require thousands of processors and lots of power, so only the largest technology companies and research universities could afford to use it. An early Google system cost more than US$1 million and used about 1,000 computers.

  Deschutes has no time for such technical feats. It invests mostly in brewing tanks, not data centers. Only when Microsoft, Amazon and Google began offering AI software over the Internet did these ideas seem plausible.

  Amazon is the public cloud leader, but each company has its strengths.

  Democratizing access to powerful AI software is the latest battleground and could decide which tech giant emerges as the ultimate winner in a cloud infrastructure market worth US$25 billion this year, according to researcher IDC.

  “There’s a new generation of applications that require a lot more intense data science and machine learning. There is a race for who is going to provide the tools for that,” said Diego Oppenheimer, chief executive officer of Algorithmia Inc, a start-up that runs a marketplace for algorithms that do some of the same things as Microsoft, Amazon and Google’s technology.

  If the tools become widespread, they could transform work as more automation lets companies get more done with the same human workforce.

  C-SPAN, which runs three TV stations and five Web channels, previously used a combination of closed-caption transcripts and staff to determine when a new speaker started talking and who it was. It was so time-consuming that the network only tagged about half of the events it broadcast.

  The network began toying with Amazon’s image-recognition cloud service the same day it launched, archive technical manager Alan Cloutier said.

  Now it is using it to match all speakers against a database it maintains of 99,000 US government officials.

  IDC expects spending on such cognitive systems and AI to grow 55 percent a year for the next five years.

  Google is late to the public cloud business and is using its AI experience and massive computational resources to catch up. A new “Advanced Solutions Lab” lets outside companies participate in training sessions with Google’s machine-learning experts.

  USAA was first to participate, tapping Google engineers to help construct software.

  USAA chief technology officer Heather Cox plans a multi-year deal with Google.

  The three leaders in the public cloud have also made capabilities like speech and image recognition available to customers who can design apps that hook into these AI features — Microsoft offers 25 different ones.

  “You can build software that is cognitive — that can sense emotion and understand your intent, recognize speech or what’s in an image — and we provide all of that in the cloud so customers can use it as part of their software,” Microsoft vice president Joseph Sirosh said.

  Amazon in November last year introduced similar tools. Rekognition tells users what is in an image, Polly converts text to human-like speech and Lex — based on the company’s popular Alexa service — uses speech and text recognition for building conversational bots.

  As the market grows and competition intensifies, each vendor will play to their strengths.

  “Google has the most credibility based on tools they have; Microsoft is the one that will actually be able to convince the enterprises to do it; and Amazon has the advantage in that most corporate data in the cloud is in” Amazon Web Services, Oppenheimer said. “It’s anybody’s game.”
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