Amazon, Microsoft crave more machine learning in the cloud

An unlikely partnership between two tech heavyweights symbolizes how cloud vendors prioritize machine learning and deep learning for the future of their platforms. Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure are the two most popular public cloud providers, with the latter trying to encroach on the former's sizable market lead. But in a surprise move, the pair has put aside their rivalry to create Gluon, an open source deep learning library intended to automate certain processes and make machine learning more approachable to developers. Both of these companies, as well Google, IBM and others, see huge potential for machine learning in the cloud and deep learning applications built on their respective platforms. But these techniques are predominantly confined to the likes of data scientists, because typical developers lack the skills to build and train the models that underlie these applications.