The Race Is On: IBM, Google, Microsoft And AWS Aim To Deliver Machine Learning As A Cloud Service

During his company's first-quarter earnings call, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said delivering artificial intelligence and machine learning as cloud services to enterprise customers "is going be a huge source of differentiation for us." "We are at an exceptionally interesting tipping point where these technologies are really taking off," Pichai told financially grounded Wall Street investors. Google, Mountain View, Calif., is engineering solutions that can enable services partners to help customers use machine learning to understand their data, he said. A couple of weeks later, at Google's I/O developers' conference, Pichai revealed a new custom chip, the Tensor Processing Unit, or TPU, that will power machine-learning workloads. One notable customer, Snapchat, already is using Google's platform to learn more about its users by studying the content of the photos they post on the social media site. And in March, Google enjoyed its own board game coup.