Cloud AI Isn't About Outsourcing Compute It Is About Joining The Front Row Of The AI Revolution

The commercial cloud that was once synonymous with the mundane task of hardware outsourcing has increasingly become far more about the services and analytic capabilities that can be built when computing power is no longer a limitation. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the world of deep learning. Companies like Google not only provide access to bleeding edge battle-tested hardware, but wrap those systems with point-and-click and data-scale analytic offerings that are increasingly democratizing access to AI. Deep learning in the cloud today is no longer merely about outsourcing compute, but actually joining the front row of the AI revolution itself. The early days of the commercial cloud were largely relegated to the unglamorous tasks of migrating workloads from bare metal on-premises computer racks to virtualized remote managed data centers. The focus was often on lifting and transferring applications to data centers that provided scalability and reliability nearly unheard of in on-premises environments.