A recent partnership between Google and Facebook has been announced and it appears that research into artificial intelligence just gained a significant amount of traction. The two competing companies have agrees to use their individual technologies to aid each other’s developments for the sake of research. With each company’s operations revolving around computing technology, it only makes sense to halt competition for research to occur that would be mutually beneficial.

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Google has been focusing on a new set of processing units called TPUs that are made specifically to aid in the processing of data for AI software and their machine learning algorithms. These incredibly efficient processing units have a much higher capability than those in most computers but its only one component. Facebook has been developing the framework for their own machine learning software and this framework is more generalized to allow for a wide array of experiments. This platform is named PyTorch and it is exactly what Google needs for their AI development. When these technologies are combined, Google will have a flexible platform for experimenting with all new AI tools in development, cutting down on the work needed to even test such products. Facebook will also receive the benefit of top of the line processors to aid their own software developments.

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The primary goal of the agreement was to increase support of PyTorch within Googles network for the millions of everyday users. This is primarily focused on Googles Cloud Storage AI system which allows vast quantities of data to be stored and processed quickly and efficiently while being accessible from almost anywhere. A company such as Facebook has enormous amounts of data extracted from the various social media and messaging applications they own. Connecting Google TPUs with PyTorch will greatly reduce the timeframe from product development to actual implementation.

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Such a partnership exemplifies the need for collaboration for the sake of innovation rather than only having fierce competition. The capabilities of artificial intelligence is impressive already but it is becoming incredibly useful as these tech giants integrate them into the most popular user platforms. Smart computing has gone from the future to the present in an unexpectedly short timeframe. The future of computing has been set up for artificial intelligence to be the cornerstone of development. Such an agreement between two of the most prominent research companies marks a desire for creation of new technology as a trend to be carried into the future.