Google confirms its purchase of data science community Kaggle

Google confirmed that it is purchasing Kaggle, after Kaggle CEO Anthony Goldbloom initially broke the news in a blog post on the data science hub's website. Google made the confirmation announcement at its Cloud Next '17 conference in San Francisco on Wednesday.

Although specific details regarding the transaction were not revealed, in his blog post Goldbloom assured members of the Kaggle community that it will remain an open and distinct platform, while taking advantage of being part of the "world's most powerful machine learning cloud." The availability of Google Cloud technology will allow Kaggle to "offer access to powerful infrastructure, scalable training and deployment services and the ability to store and query large data sets," according to the blog post.

On Google's end, Fei-Fei Li, Chief Scientist, Google's Cloud AI and Machine Learning, stated in a separate blog post that the acquisition of Kaggle will provide a big boost to Google's mission to accelerate the adoption of artificial intelligence and its related technologies by companies as well as individuals. Lowering the "barriers to AI entry" is a must, according to Li.

Kaggle is a major data science and machine learning hub where datasets on anything from health and government to video games and social media are shared and analyzed by data science experts and machine learning enthusiasts. The hub is also known for hosting competitions, some of which offer large monetary rewards, that bring together the best minds in the data science community to help solve real-world problems.

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