AT&T gains positions on the AI-front

Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the most popular trends in the modern IT industry. Almost all technology companies have set up research groups and develop their projects in this direction. The...

Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the most popular trends in the modern IT industry. Almost all technology companies have set up research groups and develop their projects in this direction.

The telecommunications giant AT&T and the company Tech Mahindra are planning to launch their new AI-platform Acumos. The project will combine a catalog of operations of already existing machine-learning models and a software platform which can combine them in order to solve complex problems, such as face recognition, and create new products. Acumos will make it possible to use the already existing designs of other programmers, rather than reinventing the wheel. The creators are relying on the ease of use: the platform is designed for both professional developers and for those who can not program.

The source code for Acumos will be open. This is not only good practice, contributing to the development of the IT industry as a whole, but also a profitable solution for AT&T itself.

First, by developing open products the company is setting technology standards that will be used by other market players. Second, open source allows you to attract a lot more professional volunteers than even the coolest IT company can afford to hire. A well-developed community of developers can create a better and more functional product in comparison with any commercial solution. The creator of the Linux operating system and the founder of the Linux Foundation, Linus Torvalds, called this rule "more eyes - fewer errors."

The catalog of machine learning models and the Acumos code will be supported by the Linux Foundation, which developed the Linux OS and other open source projects.

For the last ten years, AT&T has been actively using and developing open source projects. In many respects the impetus to this was the emergence of the iPhone. The network traffic grew by 2,500 times which greatly increased the cost of operation. It had to use cheaper solutions.

The company has already created large-scale open source projects. For example, in March, the Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) was launched. Third-party companies can use it to manage their networks.

In addition to the publicly available open version of Acumos, which the Linux Foundation will develop, organizations will be able to create private closed versions of Acumos. AT&T will use it in its corporate implementation, for example.