14 DAY TRIAL // Google confirms the acquisition of Kaggle, a community platform for data scientists and machine learning enthusiasts.
"Today, I’m excited to announce that Kaggle will be joining Google Cloud. Founded in 2010, Kaggle is home to the world's largest community of data scientists and machine learning enthusiasts. More than 800,000 data experts use Kaggle to explore, analyze and understand the latest updates in machine learning and data analytics. Kaggle is the best place to search and analyze public datasets, build machine learning models and grow your data science expertise," kicks off the blog post signed by Fei-Fei Li, Chief Scientist for Google Cloud AI and Machine Learning.
According to the announcement, Kaggle's team will be put to use in machine learning training, as well as deployment services, dataset storage, and query technologies.
In turn, the community will gain the ability to store and query large datasets thanks to Google Cloud's extensive powers.
Advantages for both sides
Kaggle, launched in 2010, now has more than 800,000 data scientists working together to explore and understand machine learning and data analytics.
So far, the community has worked together to put machine learning to use in multiple fields, including essay marking, diagnostics on heart failure, and so on. An open data platform was launched last summer, in which scientists have contributed with datasets on a wide range of topics, including credit card fraud, or tsunami wave rates
The financial details of the deal have not been released, and we're likely never to know exactly how much Google did pay for Kaggle.
"The Kaggle team will remain together and will continue Kaggle as a distinct brand within Google Cloud. We will continue to grow our competitions and open data platforms, and we will remain open to all data scientists, companies, techniques and technologies. Kaggle Kernels will continue to support a diverse ecosystem of machine learning libraries and packages supported by Google as well as those outside of Google’s toolkit," reads Kaggle's own announcement on the matter, signed by CEO Anthony Goldbloom.