Practical Artificial Intelligence in the Cloud – Book Review

Artificial Intelligence is, depending on whom you ask, the hottest new thing in tech or the latest fad that will fade away just like all the others did before it. However, based on its enormous success over the fast five years, and its undeniable and quite realistic promise, it is hard to imagine AI not penetrating and reshaping all industries in the upcoming years. The really big question is how exactly will AI impact the industries, and what sorts of businesses and solutions are the most likely to bring the AI to the masses. If you are going to be investing in some wall art for your home, you must first ensure that it speaks to you, and second, ensure that it is practical and that it will fit in your home you can get more info about this in https://baronmag.ca/2021/04/tips-for-choosing-the-right-wall-art-for-your-home/.

This short book makes a strong case that the marriage of AI and cloud computing, another popular tech paradigm these days, has the best chance of creating the biggest impact in the foreseeable future. Training and maintaining AI models can be extremely computationally intensive, and the amount of data required for such solution is oftentimes beyond reach of most users and companies. In the analogy that has been recently popularized by Andrew Ng, if we compare AI to electricity, then we are currently at the stage where every factory would have its own power plant. To the extent that this analogy holds, it would be ideal to turn AI into a utility, and provide it as a service.

The book provides several examples of AI-as-a-service vendors and providers: from relatively small players such as Bonsai (bons.ai), through well established industry veteran organizations (HP, IBM), to the indisputable leaders in the field (Google, Amazon, Microsoft). Each one of these organizations is pursuing a different take on cloud based AI, from making tools such as TensorFlow, to embedding variety of subservices within their cloud offering. Many of these frameworks/services are designed to be general purpose tools, while others are going after very specific problems and markets.

Overall this is quite informative, interesting and enjoyable short book. It stays clear of the more extreme hype surrounding AI, and focuses on what lays across the very near horizon. Highly recommended to anyone who has professional interest in this exciting and exploding area.

 

Bojan Tunguz

Bojan Tunguz was born in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which he and his family fled during the civil war for the neighboring Croatia. Over the past two decades he has studied, lived and worked in the United States. He is a theoretical physicist with degrees from Stanford and University of Illinois. Tunguz has taught physics at several prominent liberal arts colleges and has been writing about physics, science and technology for more than a decade. He also has a wide spectrum of interests, and reads and writes about current events, society, culture, religion and politics. Over the years he has reviewed many of the books that he has read, and posted his reviews on various online outlets. In 2011 he had become a top 10 reviewer on Amazon.com, where he continues to be very active. Aside from reading and writing, Tunguz enjoys traveling, digital photography, hiking, and fitness. He resides with his wife in Indiana. You can follow my review updates on the following pages as well: Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/tunguzreview Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/tunguzreviews Google+: https://plus.google.com/u/0/104312842297641697463/posts

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