Google has open sourced its artificial intelligence engine

Google has made the artificial intelligence engine which powers services such as Google Now and Photos, and improves its search results, available online for free.

Called TensorFlow, Google’s AI engine is now an open-source project.

Wired reported that by giving the software away, Google believes it can accelerate the evolution of AI – while benefiting from the contributions of outsiders to the project.

The search giant describes TensorFlow as a software library for numerical computation using data flow graphs.

Nodes in the graph represent mathematical operations, while the graph edges represent the tensors (or multidimensional data arrays) communicated between them.

Google said this flexible architecture lets developers deploy computation to one or more CPUs or GPUs in a desktop, server, or mobile device with a single API.

Only part of the AI engine is being open sourced, though, along with some of the algorithms that run atop the platform.

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