The combination of artificial intelligence and the cloud
The combination of AI and the cloud is very real, already happening, and will change the entire game in terms of business scalability
Talk of artificial intelligence (AI) and the cloud is not simply the work of technologies that are desperate to combine their two favourite topics into one conversation.
Let’s pretend for a second that the cloud computing and AI industries are mutually exclusive. The global AI market is expected to be worth almost $60 billion by 2025. Standing at around $2.5 billion at the end of 2017, it is one of the fastest-growing markets in the world today. On the other hand, the cloud industry has already trodden the path from hype to broad adoption and is a different beast altogether.
The public cloud industry alone already stands at over $200 billion and is forecast to be worth over $1,250 billion by 2025. So, with the cloud industry propelling its growth, could the forecasts about AI adoption ultimately prove to be conservative?
It’s 25 years since Richard Stallman wrote the GNU General Public License that spawned a generation of open source software projects. Open source and free software enabled the likes of Google and Amazon to create vast server farms, at a cost that wasn’t simply possible if they had to pay licensing fees. AI is finally taking off, and this is in no small part due to the cloud.
The cloud is fundamental to the AI model in two ways: First, given that the data sets these companies are using would not be accessible if it was not for the cloud, and secondly, because only the cloud can enable businesses to cope with the phenomenal scale required by providing such data-intensive services to multiple clients at an affordable cost.
Of course, one of the biggest factors holding AI back from reaching critical mass is the shortage of people within enterprises with the skills to programme it. This means that while businesses may know how they want to use AI, they don’t have the means of building an application or algorithm to produce the results they crave.
The cloud changes this as it means that years of research and tools are available to developers tasked with creating AI solutions. This can completely change the way businesses scale as those startups were founded by incredibly smart people that are building new and exciting AI functionalities and have infinite resources waiting to be drawn upon in the cloud.
There are some success stories out there in the startup world already using AI to find new solutions to existing problems. Veritone has developed an operating system for AI using a cloud-based cognitive computing platform which analyses a vast number of datasets from different sources. Veritone believes that the full potential of its “cognitive cloud” platform will only be unlocked when it is open to all businesses, institutions, and individuals (as right now 80% of the world’s data is unreadable by machines).
