Why do we think that the future of Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be powered by cloud computing?

• Md. Shahnawaz Israil

As per Statista, the Artificial Intelligence or AI market will grow to $60 billion worldwide by 2025. All the biggies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft wish to be the top-notch AI service providers through cloud computing. These major players are trying to build sophisticated AI based platforms that can beat the platform that their competitor is building.

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We can also think of Artificial intelligence (AI) as a type of technology that is expected to improve the existing cloud platform and fuel the next gen cloud computing technologies. This is mainly as AI has changed the programming frameworks and next gen hardware technologies. If I were to give you some quick pointers on what makes cloud computing for AI, I’d list down a few like below:

• With Cloud computing, AI is more plausible and accessible. It is primarily as most of the hardware that people use are incapable of handling AI applications. Yes, we are saying that smartphones and laptops are not competent to manage AI applications on their own
• Cloud provides better accuracy and speed for many GPU applications like machine vision.
• Hybrid cloud enables simple tasks to be parsed on device and run locally without the need of an internet connection

Recently, Microsoft made an announcement that they will focus on cloud computing and data led artificial intelligence. In an email with the subject Embracing our future: Intelligent Cloud and Intelligent Edge addressed to employees, Satya Nadella said, “Over the past year, we have shared our vision for how the intelligent cloud and intelligent edge will shape the next phase of innovation. First, computing is more powerful and ubiquitous from the cloud to the edge. Second, AI capabilities are rapidly advancing across perception and cognition fueled by data and knowledge of the world. Third, physical and virtual worlds are coming together to create richer experiences that understand the context surrounding people, the things they use, the places they go, and their activities and relationships.”

Jeff Dean who is the head of Google Brain feels that there are 20 million organizations around the globe that wish to leverage machine learning technologies but are not able to as they don’t have to right people, experience or infrastructure to support it.

Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and IBM Cloud are already offering Machine Learning as a Service (MLaaS) as a component of their cloud platform. AI is added to business applications along with deep learning models that are pretrained. It can help in image recognition, simplify the process of building, customizing and training different models in the cloud. We have already seen personal assistants that respond to voice commands like Cortana and Siri. Moving on to the next level, cloud can help pull data from different servers, learn new things and have an intelligent conversation.

Microsoft Cognitive Services, IBM Watson, Google Cloud Vision or Natural Language APIs are technologies that are helping to address complicated AI or cognitive computing capabilities with simple API calls. It lets applications amplify AI capabilities without the need to build a sophisticated AI infrastructure. AI technologies are changing from a basic technology to a more mature capability that is widely supported by databases and web.

So basically, Artificial Intelligence is helping organizations to analyze and learn with an analysis of data, it helps to identify patterns and offers real-time insightful data driven decisions leading to process automation. The combined future of cloud computing and AI is inevitable. It will totally change the way data is stored and processed in different industries and domains.

We can confidently say that AI will streamline the capabilities of cloud and make it more powerful. Cloud computing will be a platform for AI and AI will automate, manage and operate cloud computing operations. Both will act as means to each other.

If you wish to leverage AI for cloud computing, speak to one of our experts.