Lyft to open-source some of its AI algorithm testing tools

Lyft has spent a lot of time building tools that help it simulate the results of machine learning algorithms, and the company plans to make these tools more broadly available in the near future. The company's simulators are a key part of its machine learning development process, according to Erbil Karaman, the head of product for Lyft's marketplace team. When Lyft first starts testing machine learning models, they get run through simulators to figure out their early impact. "That does model emulation and looks at what are called hyper parameters and some of the outcomes that we care about and tries to tell us early signals for what this model can do differently from other models," Karaman said during a panel at VentureBeat's MB 2017 conference in San Francisco. The company's routing algorithm, pricing algorithm, driver-matching algorithm, and other systems all rely on machine learning models to one degree or another.