The Great AI Wars

Last week saw one of the last big players make their position in machine learning and AI clearer at Apple's WWDC event with the launch of their machine learning options. These days you're not a credible large cloud provider if you don't provide some interesting APIs around machine learning and AI with the likes of Google, IBM, Amazon, Microsoft (Azure), and Alibaba (Aliyun) to name but a few. Apple's discussion focuses on being able to embed these technologies on the device with the Apps rather than perhaps the building of the models and the execution – much less focus on pushing data into the cloud.

The war I speak of in the title however, is not some dystopian future where humanity fights for survival but rather the current war over talent that enables the use of these technologies. Insurers going through digital transformations and looking deeply at their analytics are finding they are competing with ever more unlikely companies for talent including rising InsurTech firms as observed in previous blogs. The good news is that basic machine learning capability and training is increasingly available as the democratisation of machine learning continues apace – in fact if you look at Apple's documentation this discusses the ease downloading and converting models and integrating them to Apps rather than the nuances of various training algorithms.