Why eBay believes in open-sourcing Krylov, its AI platform

It's hard to find a tech company that isn't attempting some sort of AI-related product, service, or initiative these days, but eBay went all-in by building its own AI platform, called Krylov. Sanjeev Katariya, eBay's VP and chief architect of AI and platforms, described Krylov in an interview with VentureBeat: "At the very highest level, Krylov is a machine learning platform that enables data scientists and machine learning engineers to ship all different kinds of models for all kinds of data quickly into production, which gets integrated into user experiences that eBay ships globally." It's a multi-tenant, cloud-based platform that involves technologies like computer vision and natural language processing (NLP), techniques including distributed training and hyper-parameter tuning, and tools germane to eBay's services, like merchandising recommendations, buyer personalization, seller price guidance, and shipping estimates. Even if they did, the hard costs -- however significant they may or may not be -- wouldn't fully capture what eBay has invested to build the platform over years of internal organizational efforts around the globe. And after all that, eBay is now open-sourcing Krylov.