During a virtual keynote at Google I/O 2021, Google's developer conference, Google Cloud has launched Vertex AI, a fully managed cloud platform that simplifies the deployment and maintenance of machine learning models. It's designed to help companies to accelerate the deployment and maintenance of AI models, Google says, by requiring nearly 80% fewer lines of code to train a model versus competitive platforms. Vertex offers access to the MLOps toolkit internally at Google for computer vision, language, conversation, and structured data workloads. MLOps, a compound of machine learning and information technology operations, is a newer discipline involving collaboration between data scientists and IT professionals to productize machine learning algorithms. "Data scientists have a big challenge about manually piecing ML point solutions, creating a lag time in model development and experimentation, resulting in very few models making it into production. To tackle these challenges, Vertex AI brings together the Google Cloud services for building ML under one unified UI and API, to simplify the process of building, training, and deploying machine learning models at scale" Craig Wiley, the director of product management for Google Cloud's AI Platform states.

At Google I/O today Google Cloud announced Vertex AI, a new managed machine learning platform that is meant to make it easier for developers to deploy and maintain their AI models. It's a bit of an odd announcement at I/O, which tends to focus on mobile and web developers and doesn't traditionally feature a lot of Google Cloud news, but the fact that Google decided to announce Vertex today goes to show how important it thinks this new service is for a wide range of developers. The launch of Vertex is the result of quite a bit of introspection by the Google Cloud team. "Machine learning in the enterprise is in crisis, in my view," Craig Wiley, the director of product management for Google Cloud's AI Platform, told me. "As someone who has worked in that space for a number of years, if you look at the Harvard Business Review or analyst reviews, or what have you -- every single one of them comes out saying that the vast majority of companies are either investing or are interested in investing in machine learning and are not getting value from it.