Machine Learning, AI and Big Data Tools Open-Sourced By Major Corporations

The goal of this article is to provide an overview of frameworks relevant to Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence released by large corporations. We focus not just on pure Machine Learning and AI tools but also include some Big Data frameworks which provide value in making Machine Learning and AI available at scale. While these releases do have very strategic business reasons, there is no doubt that the trend of open-sourcing internal tools is adding value and making Machine Learning and AI more accessible. Over the past 2-3 years a large number of frameworks have been open-sourced. Companies may wish to establish standards, showcase their advanced level of research, attract talent or leverage the power of a community when open-sourcing tools. Whatever the reasons may be for open-sourcing tools, large organizations tend to have extensive resources which they use to build their internal tools. For businesses interested in exploring Data Science it only makes sense to evaluate whether any effort that has already gone into building these frameworks can be leveraged. We provide a summary of released tools, but not a comparison of the individual frameworks. Especially when it comes to Deep Learning, entire communities have formed around tools, and with that very dedicated fans and opponents. While we avoid such discussions, we provide our own observations and conclude the article with some generic guidelines for evaluating frameworks for business use.