DeepMind has been using the open source Torch7 machine learning library for nearly four years as its primary research platform. The company has contributed to the open source project in capacities ranging from occasional bug fixes to being core maintainers of several crucial components.
Now the company is going to be using a Google-owned platform for future endeavors. On the Google Research blog they posted:
Today we are excited to announce that DeepMind will start using TensorFlow for all our future research. We believe that TensorFlow will enable us to execute our ambitious research goals at much larger scale and an even faster pace, providing us with a unique opportunity to further accelerate our research programme.
Part of the move is undoubtedly a bit of the software industry application of ‘eat your own dogfood.’ Torch7 is currently being used by Facebook, Twitter, and many start-ups and academic labs along with DeepMind. Moving to TensorFlow will be a big win for Google overall if the DeepMind team can contribute to the development at a high level.
The move also suggests that some of Google’s brightest AI minds are convinced of the promise of Google’s own open source software; TensorFlow may now be good enough for DeepMind to use too.
"I feel very excited about the prospect of DeepMind contributing heavily to another great open source machine learning platform that everyone can use to advance the state-of-the-art," writes Koray Kavukcuoglu, Research Scientist, Google DeepMind on the Google Research blog.
Google is definitely moving to integrate and expand their artificial intelligence efforts. In CEO Sundar Picha’s first-ever letter to shareholders, he said the next wave of computing is all about machine learning.