For better or worse, artificial intelligence could play a major role in the future of the human race. One thing's certain, though - with so few individuals skilled enough to train it effectively, AI isn't going to advance at anywhere near the rate leading companies in the industry might hope for.

Enter Google's latest project. In the interest of making the training of AI faster and easier for businesses and innovators, two members of Google's Cloud AI team – Chief Scientist Fei-Fei Li and Head of R&D Jia Li – recently unveiled their new "Cloud AutoML" tool.

"Currently, only a handful of businesses in the world have access to the talent and budgets needed to fully appreciate the advancements of ML and AI," the post reads. "To close this gap, and to make AI accessible to every businesses, we're introducing Cloud AutoML."

The team's first tool will be dubbed Cloud AutoML Vision. It will include a simple drag-and-drop interface that allows AI trainers to easily "upload images, train and manage models, and then deploy those trained models directly on the Google Cloud."

The post offers a brief overview of the tool's main perks:

  • Increased accuracy: Cloud AutoML Vision is built on Google's leading image recognition approaches, including transfer learning and neural architecture search technologies. This means you'll get a more accurate model even if your business has limited machine learning expertise.
  • Faster turnaround time to production-ready models: With Cloud AutoML, you can create a simple model in minutes to pilot your AI-enabled application, or build out a full, production-ready model in as little as a day.
  • Easy to use: AutoML Vision provides a simple graphical user interface that lets you specify data, then turns that data into a high quality model customized for your specific needs.

As intriguing as this new tool sounds, it doesn't come free.

While the Cloud AI team's post didn't offer specifics on pricing, fees will be charged for both the use of the tool itself and access to trained models. Furthermore, you'll need to fill out a pretty detailed application to even be considered for the tool's Alpha program meaning there's very little chance you'll be able to use it for anything other than business purposes for now.