by kornish on 3/8/17, 5:30 AM
This is obviously a talent acquisition in more ways than one (the Kaggle team, but also their ability to source machine learning talent). I wonder to what degree it's also a Tensorflow promotion move? It seems like Google is very interested in growing a community around it.
For example: some friends who run a seed-stage biotech deep learning startup were offered a considerable discount by the Google Cloud folks. Their ask? That the company switch to Google Cloud, rewrite some proprietary software in Tensorflow, and heavily publicize both moves.
I wonder if we'll see Kaggle gain a specific bent towards that ecosystem.
by jboggan on 3/8/17, 6:43 AM
I have a soft spot in my heart for Kaggle. I was motivated to get into the software industry 5 years ago when they ran their first Facebook hiring challenge. How else to break into an industry I had no degree in?
I didn't do so well in the competition but it got me coding every day and it gave me enough to talk about that I figured I could sell all my things and ride a motorcycle to California and start knocking on doors. It worked, after a fashion.
I also have a soft spot in my heart for Kaggle because I interviewed there during my first month in San Francisco and it was absolutely the worst interview of my life.
by conjectures on 3/8/17, 1:25 PM
Kaggle is a great idea, but it's steadily getting more annoying to use.
1) Cruft on all landing pages and having to click through to get to the comps page which is the site.
2) Annoying focus on exploratory notebooks. Inevitably they aren't powerful enough and people link through to external sites.
3) Forcing the use of 3rd party compute platforms to enter comps. Half the fun for me is messing around with my own ideas and this just gets in the way. These should be optional rather than required.
4) Poor incentives. Many of the comps have tiny prizes for the value of work that gets done. They're also concentrated way too much at the top. Unless there's something I want to try out, the expected value of participating is way too low to do it just for the giggles.
by marcelsalathe on 3/8/17, 8:13 AM
https://www.crowdAI.org is an open source alternative. Disclaimer, my research group at EPFL started the platform, because we think there should be a community-based open source version that is open to anyone. Always looking for contributors!
Edit (1): Github https://github.com/crowdAI/crowdai
Edit (2): We're currently re-designing the whole site to look & feel better.
by iamseiko on 3/8/17, 5:34 AM
That's disappointing. Google will probably keep the service alive for recruiting and the consumer base, while most of it's technologies will probably be shut off. Being owned by Google might also mean that some companies might not want to post challenges on Kaggle anymore, like Facebook or Microsoft.
by codesternews on 3/8/17, 7:06 AM
This is worst news I read today. Kaggle independently serve more purpose to community than a baby of some large giants.
I love kaggle and I am very disappointed that google acquire everything we love.
by soheil on 3/8/17, 5:41 AM
I'm a little sad about this, what will Google do with this? Are they going to drain its soul? I think at a minimum the people behind Kaggle won't feel the same urge to keep building , maintaining and growing it the same way as before, specially as the $$$ flows in their pockets. It will probably change direction by people at Google in control and I'm not sure if that's a good thing since they didn't just built something like this on their own or a better version of it if they were really good at doing stuff like this themselves.
by jph00 on 3/8/17, 5:03 AM
Why does the article say that Ben Hamner was involved in the founding in 2010? He joined years later. Some basic fact checking would be nice, even in tech articles...
(Ben has been a great contributor, mind you.)
by throw_away_777 on 3/8/17, 5:35 AM
Congrats to the Kaggle team! One great thing about Kaggle was that the team listened and sought out feedback from users (even if they didn't always follow the feedback). I hope that doesn't change with the acquisition.
by chis on 3/8/17, 7:27 AM
DrivenData.org is a solid competitor without much publicity. Maybe they'll take over some of the traffic if Kaggle changes for the worse.
by dthal on 3/8/17, 4:59 AM
Well, supposing this is correct...Congratulations to Anthony and the rest of the Kaggle team! Those guys do a great job. Hopefully they get rewarded for it.
by macca321 on 3/8/17, 9:45 AM
Congrats to Jeff and the rest of the team. I'd be interested to hear how much .NET survives the transition!
by nstart on 3/8/17, 7:32 AM
This could well end up being a fantastic move for Google to also acquire customers in its platform. If Kaggle moved large pieces of its competition to be automatically hosted on GCE it might be a good win for Google. So like Kaggle's "kernels", GCE machine learning tools would become an extension that's usable with it in a really simple way. Not entirely sure what that might look like, but it feels like this kind of integration would be the best for both parties.
by alantrrs on 3/8/17, 10:28 AM
Since we're sharing alternatives:
https://empiricalci.com is a dashboard to keep track of your experiments & compare them on public benchmarks.
by luckystartup on 3/8/17, 3:42 PM
> Kaggle, which has about half a million data scientists on its platform, ...
Are there really that many data scientists? I thought it was a niche specialty. Is there enough work for that many people?
by outericky on 3/8/17, 6:18 AM
Best of luck to the Kaggle team. We attended a data scientist conference they presented at in 2012 which led to our YC application, and formation for SimpleLegal. Hats off...
by qkhhly on 3/8/17, 7:28 AM
Google probably want to use Kaggle as Google cloud entry point for the data scientist community. Kaggle has a lot of student and entry level data scientist. Getting those users to start to use Google cloud could potentially drive the growth of lots of potential customers.
by Nydhal on 3/8/17, 4:57 AM
I'm not sure if this is good or bad news. I wonder what google motives are and how they will influence kaggle if this becomes reality.
by deepnotderp on 3/8/17, 5:02 AM
Only Google can spend this much on what's ultimately a recruiting project.
by jader201 on 3/8/17, 7:16 PM
by alxvio on 3/8/17, 7:01 PM
by rochak on 3/8/17, 12:51 PM
Good luck to Kaggle's employees. They have done a phenomenal job.
by EternalData on 3/8/17, 6:45 PM
I think having a dataset on who is really interested in machine learning and applying it in practice can only help Google. Plus, if they kind of lurk on the side, you don't get enough of the Google brand overwhelming Kaggle so that it disrupts the community, but in the back of the minds of people going into competitions and who are in the know, it might help incentivize people who think "Hey, Google is really interested in this".
by sullyj3 on 3/9/17, 2:52 PM
How could a company called "Google" not acquire a company called "Kaggle"? This makes me giggle.
by gumboshoes on 3/8/17, 4:23 PM
by ebbv on 3/8/17, 5:07 AM
Guess that means Kaggle users can expect it to be shut down in the next five years.
by huula on 3/8/17, 5:15 AM
Don't know why. Just don't think this is going to happen.
by pizza on 3/8/17, 5:14 AM
Deep Mind keeps acquiring appendages
by moizsajid on 3/11/17, 3:38 AM
Really excited about this acquisition! Might open new avenues for the data science community.
by nafizh on 3/8/17, 4:58 AM
This must imply Kaggle has some internal software that Google want?
by tzs on 3/8/17, 8:33 PM
I wonder if that's the only one they want, or if they are also going to try to get other relics such the Knife of Exact Zero, the Fleece-Crested Scepter of Que-Teep, or the Orb of Ti-Teleest?
by inopinatus on 3/8/17, 6:57 AM
Hopefully there will be no uncertainties in the acquisition. If not they can form a team to fix them. But I'm joking around: this is a Google-Kaggle niggle gaggle giggle.
by maverick_iceman on 3/8/17, 4:25 PM
Anyone knows what was the price?
by danaliv on 3/8/17, 5:35 AM
Whoever named this company has literally never spoken to a woman.
by joelthelion on 3/8/17, 8:35 AM
Yuck.
by mostafab on 3/8/17, 2:13 PM
good news, I did not like the whole Kaggle concept anyway: thousands of people over-engineering solutions for one problem, paid peanuts, while there are more rewarding problems than talent available. It was a huge waste of scarce brainpower. I am launching my Kaggle alternative, landing page here:
http://startcrowd.club/ Thanks Google for eliminating my competitor.
