Why Google Is Willing to Give Away Its Latest Machine-Learning Software

Google's move to give away its latest machine-learning software, key to its speech- and photo-recognition programs, isn't as crazy as it may appear. The unit of Alphabet said Monday it is releasing its TensorFlow system for free under an open-source license. That's one of the company's crown jewels, a machine-learning program that teaches computers to be smarter. But Google retains much of what makes its machine-learning effort special: massive piles of data, a powerful network of computers to run the software and a big team of artificial-intelligence experts to tweak the algorithms. "It's not a suicidal idea to release this," said Nello Cristianini, a professor of artificial intelligence at the U.K.'s University of Bristol.