
Kaggle Joins Google Cloud - transcranial
http://blog.kaggle.com/2017/03/08/kaggle-joins-google-cloud/
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blobbers
Is anyone else worried that Kaggle no longer being independent will cause the
diversity of contests to diminish?

I'm not sure that another Fortune 500 company would be as comfortable running
their contest on a site that is part of Google (given that google may be privy
to the entries or datasets in some special way)

------
minimaxir
The previous thread speculated the value-add of Kaggle to Google. From
Google's side of the announcement:

> We must lower the barriers of entry to AI and make it available to the
> largest community of developers, users and enterprises, so they can apply it
> to their own unique needs. With Kaggle joining the Google Cloud team, we can
> accelerate this mission.

What does Kaggle do for "lowering the barrier to entry?" (And to AI
specifically, as Kaggle competitions tend to be more solvable with things like
xgboost, without requiring deep learning)

The Kaggle announcement mentions data storage for public datasets, but Google
already has BigQuery.

~~~
halflings
It's all in the announcement:

> Making Google Cloud technology available to our community will allow us to
> offer access to powerful infrastructure, scalable training and deployment
> services and the ability to store and query large data sets.

So they will basically extend what happened in the Youtube 8M competition
(being able to run your code on Google Cloud directly instead of having to
spin your own EC2 cluster etc.).

~~~
got2surf
Exactly - at the end of the day, the majority of Kaggle users are potential
Google customers. Majority of them would probably buy Google API access
outright (for things like NLP, for example). A minority is probably more
interested in building their own AI-based processing pipline using Google
Cloud resources.

