The Renaissance Continues for Open Source Artificial Intelligence

Recently, in an article for TechCrunch, Spark Capital's John Melas-Kyriazi weighed in on how startups can leverage artificial intelligence to advance their businesses or even give birth to brand new ones. As a corollary avenue on that topic, it's worth noting that some very powerful artificial intelligence engines have recently been open sourced. Quite a few of them have been tested and hardened at Google, Facebook, Microsoft and other companies, and some of them may represent business opportunities.

Microsoft, with the blessing of CEO Satya Nadella (shown) is playing a big part in open sourcing new artificial intelligence tools. Here are a few of these open tools from Microsoft, and some others to know about. Microsoft's Cognitive Toolkit, which can drive next-generation speech recognition, was released recently in beta. The latest version is available on GitHub via an open source license. Meanwhile, the company has also released an artificial intelligence system dubbed Project Malmo to the open source community. 

Startups should take note. Previously referred to as Project AIX, the platform is targeted to give startups an easy way to test out artificial intelligence programming without the need to build robots to test commands and comprehension with physical subjects. The system, which had until now only been open to a small group of computer scientists in private preview, can help researchers develop sophisticated, more general artificial intelligence, or AI, that can do things like learn, hold conversations, make decisions and complete complex tasks...