While artificial intelligence (AI) is a critical tool for business today, the current state of today's AI environment is so fractured, it is creating a significant barrier to adoption.
That's the view of Mazin Gilbert, AT&T Labs' VP of Advanced Technology, explaining why AT&T had joined The Linux Foundation (TLF), the nonprofit organisation enabling mass innovation through open source, and India's Tech Mahindra, a company specialising in digital transformation, consulting and business reengineering, in taking the first steps towards what is hoped will be a solution to this problem.
Growing numbers of vendors are adding machine learning to their products, but commentators have noted that even if the machine learning products are open source, they might as well be proprietary because the lack of standards means none of these developments are easily interchangeable. The call for the establishment of some machine learning and AI standards is growing louder.
The announcement last month of the creation of the Acumos Project by TLF appears to be a firm response. While still in formation - it is not expected to be launched before early 2018 - it is aimed at providing a common framework and platform for the free exchange of machine learning solutions, thus making AI available to everyone.
In addition, TLF hopes that the Acumos platform will help to remove some of the complexity from current AI tools, which, it says, are difficult to use and often designed for data scientists. The Acumos platform, TLF maintains, will be user-centric, with an initial focus on creating apps and microservices.
"An open and connected AI platform will promote collaboration as developers and companies look to define the future of AI," said Jim Zemlin, TLF Executive. "Because the platform is open source, it will be accessible to anyone with an interest in AI and machine learning, and customisable to meet specific needs. We expect interest from organisations doing work with autonomous vehicles, drones, content curation and analytics, and much more."
AT&T and Tech Mahindra are contributing the Acumos Project code to The Linux Foundation. TLF will host the platform and its AI marketplace with the goal of nurturing an active, large ecosystem around the project to sustain it over the long term.
While AT&T and Tech Mahindra are the Acumos Project's two founding organisations, the Linux Foundation has made it clear that it hopes others will join in the coming weeks.
"Acumos will expedite innovation and deployment of AI applications, and make them available to everyone," Gilbert said.
"Our focus with this project is to apply AI/ML to solve real-world, practical problems at enterprises big and small," said Raman Abrol, SVP & Business Unit Head of Americas, Comms, Media and Entertainment at Tech Mahindra. "In the past few years we have successfully brought automation to help customers run better, change faster and grow greater. With Acumos, we seek to build on that experience and together with the open source community accelerate AI/ML-related benefits to realise benefits for our customers and partners."
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