Amazon launches a bunch of machine learning goodies for developers

At the AWS Re:Invent event Amazon Web Services served up a large number of initiatives designed to make machine learning more accessible to developers and data scientists.

Even these are just a small part of an orgy of announcements from the enterprise cloud market leader, with nine press releases sent out yesterday alone. The plucky hacks at Enterprise Cloud News are living the AWS dream over in Vegas and even managing to extract themselves from the casinos and night clubs to cover the event, so we’ll leave the in-depth stuff to them.

Here are the six bits of machine learning cleverness revealed in the culminating release

“Our original vision for AWS was to enable any individual in his or her dorm room or garage to have access to the same technology, tools, scale, and cost structure as the largest companies in the world. Our vision for machine learning is no different,” said Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of Machine Learning, AWS.

“We want all developers to be able to use machine learning much more expansively and successfully, irrespective of their machine learning skill level. Amazon SageMaker removes a lot of the muck and complexity involved in machine learning to allow developers to easily get started and become competent in building, training, and deploying models.”

As ever, advances in AI and machine learning bring with them a conflicting mixture of awe and unease. This latest batch of announcements from Amazon seem to be heavy on the surveillance side of things in so much as they will make it easier for other people to track our activities. Anyone already concerned about data privacy is unlikely to be reassured by this sort of thing.