How the cloud vendors are battling to democratise AI for developers

Developer conference season is in full flow, with Facebook's F8 last week and Microsoft Build, Google I/O and Amazon Web Services holding a London Summit this week, and they all had one thing in common: the goal of making AI technology more accessible for developers on their platforms. The big three cloud vendors made a slew of announcements this week, although AWS holds back most of its good stuff for re:Invent in Las Vegas later on in the year, all centring on machine learning and AI technologies. The idea is that by simplifying complex and powerful AI technology like computer vision, natural language understanding and deep learning models, these tech giants can lock developers into their ecosystem and milk them for cash as they consume infrastructure and services. So what did each of these companies say regarding AI this week? CTO Werner Vogels said: "Our mission is to make machine learning available and put it into the hands of every developer."