Google Just Open Sourced the Artificial Intelligence Engine at the Heart of Its Online Empire

Tech pundit Tim O'Reilly had just tried the new Google Photos app, and he was amazed by the depth of its artificial intelligence. O'Reilly was standing a few feet from Google CEO and co-founder Larry Page this past May, at a small cocktail reception for the press at the annual Google I/O conference--the centerpiece of the company's year. Google had unveiled its personal photos app earlier in the day, and O'Reilly marveled that if he typed something like "gravestone" into the search box, the app could find a photo of his uncle's grave, taken so long ago. Google is open sourcing software that sits at the heart of its empire. The app uses an increasingly powerful form of artificial intelligence called deep learning. By analyzing thousands of photos of gravestones, this AI technology can learn to identify a gravestone it has never seen before.