Google is making a big machine learning and AI push in cloud services

Today, Google Cloud chief Diane Greene announced the company's new push in machine learning and artificial intelligence. There's now a new group in Greene's division that will unify some of the disparate teams that had previously been doing machine learning work across Google's cloud. Two women will take charge of the new team: Fei-Fei Li, who was director of AI at Stanford, and Jia Li, who was previously head of research at Snap, Inc. As Business Insider notes, Jia Li was one of the minds behind the Snapchat feature that lets you attach emoji to real-world objects in your snaps. The news came at the top of a slew of announcements about the product roadmap for Google's cloud services and how they're expanding their use of machine learning, a critical technique for training large-scale AI networks to teach and improve themselves over time. The announcements were all aimed at showing how Google's cloud services include more than just renting time on a server -- that it can provide services to its enterprise customers that are based on its machine learning algorithms.