Google's Kaggle now has 1 million developers signed up for AI competitions

Kaggle, a website that hosts public competitions on machine learning tasks, announced Tuesday that it now has over 1 million users a little more than 7 years after it launched. It's a sign of accelerating interest in the artificial intelligence and machine learning field, since Kaggle competitions give data scientists a way to test techniques on real-world tasks with the chance to compete for prize money. Competitions work by providing teams with a data set, and then evaluating how well the models they create succeed at the task set out. The company's first competition began April 7, 2010, with 22 teams attempting to predict votes on the Eurovision music competition. Since then, it has become a key part of the data science ecosystem.