Microsoft and Amazon have partnered to bring AI to the masses

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become the center of today's biggest tech companies, including Google, Microsoft and Amazon, as well as social-networking giant Facebook, and even Apple. When these companies talk about AI, they're mostly referring to developing and perfecting deep learning systems that power a number of their products and services. Training machine learning algorithms can be tedious -- requiring tons of data sets -- and involves highly specialized tools. Which is why, rivals Amazon and Microsoft have recently teamed up for better research on cloud services and, to make AI available to more developers. On Thursday, they unveiled a new open-source deep-learning interface called Gluon.